This argument is based on premise that the the will to will is out of the set of "Will" , In other words, it assumes the premise that " want to want " does not come under same set of wants/choices
I've been saying a similar thing to myself about free will for quite some time. It's obvious based on life experience we are not totally free in almost every aspect. We have some apparently more free or less free choices. But everything is largely determined by prior events. Thumbs up.
but there is that moment is which you ponder about what to do. If was just due to previous processes then the body would not wait hours, days, months to take a decision. In idealism that "movie" can lead the true consciousness to learn through it ... but i prefer the most simple option and free will really exist.
@@francesco5581 Thanks for your reply. I don't deny the existence of free will or choice. I'm simply agreeing with the professor that free will is limited or constrained and thus not totally free . . . only partially free.
I am afraid that for a pure "tough minded" scientist everything is completely determined by prior events. Pragmatism as per William James is the most effective response.
@@piehound there is no partial. Will and thought are completely determined. Imagine choosing to have “soup AND salad,”- only to find out the waiter said “soup OR salad.” The physical world determined your choices because you misinterpreted the incoming data. You chose based on your understanding of reality, but the reality was not what you thought it was…..your will was physically determined even though it was wrong. Your ears were the physical determinant where reality went askew. If your will were free, you would have made the correct decision regardless of the faulty intel.
No. You can’t determine what thoughts and preferences you have. Your choices are made based on thoughts beyond your control. That’s where the illusion comes from.
OK. Well, what about meditation - haven't we the Will to cast all our thoughts aside, even if it takes effort and time? From outward direction to the inner direction, that the Wiseman teach.
@@S3RAVA3LMgreat question. 👍🏻I think the act of training yourself to empty your mind is an act motivated by something. To seek enlightenment is a motivation not of your own choice. Something makes a person seek answers and enlightenment, just as something makes other people seek answers in department stores, shopping malls, and churches. Bodhisttivas practice “no mind” because it was instilled in them by 2,000 years of teachings. To train yourself to empty your mind is not as paramount as the thought “I need to sit and meditate ‘now.” Something physical triggered the thought to sit and empty their mind. But in order to do do, they have to focus on something….breathing or candle light. It takes dedication to empty the mind of thought, but focusing on breathing or candle light is still a thought. I would be interested in seeing the EEG scans of a master in deep meditation to see if their brain is really devoid of electrical activity. But to control your thoughts, even a Buddhist master cannot control the thoughts they have. Their thoughts define them! If a person is driven to meditate in a zen monastery, and that person is compelled to practice emptying their mind, then their actions label them a zen master. It’s not the other way around. A zem master doesn’t decide to meditate. A serial bank robber doesn’t decide to rob banks. Robbing banks makes them a robber …etc. our thoughts and actions are not ours to decide, but we are labeled and defined by them regardless. Just as a rabid dog is deemed a rabid dog thru no fault of its own.
We have a hierarchy of preferences. We may choose a flavor we don’t like over one we do, but the choice was not made because of our preference for taste, but our preference for some other factor….cost, sight, convenience, allergies….we have preferences and we have preferences of preferences…..on and on. We always choose our preferences, but we also prioritize our preferences according to importance or whatever. I might love chocolate but allergic to it. So I prefer not to get sick, over tasting chocolate. Preferences are not all created equal. The preference for survival over rides my preference for chocolate. My preference for chocolate over rides my preference for cabbage. Etc. In all cases, we are not free to determine our preferences, nor are we free to choose against them.
4:02 every decision made from awareness inputs is part of higher level processing units and therefore consciousness is directly involved by exercising its ability to act with a certain degree of freedom...
@@r2c3 : Being aware that we are making calculations doesn't explain why we make any specific choice. We do what we want but we can only discover what we want. We don't want things for no reason and every reason has a cause and that has a cause etc.
@@lrvogt1257 I'd say, we're able to make a choice only because we're aware of the available options... awareness of making a decision, as a result of evaluating alternatives, is strong evidence of agency and therefore free-will... and yes, causality is clearly part of reality as is our ability to interact with various elements within it...
0:46 ... I think the concept of Free Will is confused the reason it's confused is that free will on the usual concept is incompatible with determinism and it's also incompatible with indeterminism (let's discuss what that means) 0:57 ... 2:24 ❤... because you're defining free will in a diminished way (that's right!) 2:26 ... 5:05 ... but if you are defining consciousness is a purely physical manner which you do (yeah) so therefore it is produced by a whole series of biological events in the past that lead up to the way it is today (right) uh much less much like uh um digestive juices are the product of glands in the stomach or (right) the kidney excreting urine or something like that it's a normal bodily process that are based on these events doesn't that ipsofacto by the same reasoning uh make consciousness uh completely determined 5:46
Ned Block's determinism vs indeterminism (randomness) reflects physicalism's fixation with bottom-up causation. What is missing from this conversation is top-down causation. Once we factor in culture as the foundation for our personal identities, it becomes more clear that it is free will - *as the choices that we make from culture* - that wires our neuroplastic brains from the top-down. Refer to yesterday's interview with George Lakoff, discussing metaphor, narratives, emotion, qualia, experience, semiotics. These relate to how we freewill our choices from culture, the top-down causation that teaches us our identities.
he could then simply say that those top-down effects you speak of are caused by bottom-up processes, it's not like culture came out of nowhere or created itself in an independent manner. Culture obviously influences us to a great deal but the point is exactly that culture is also determined by more fundamental processes.
Every moment is a direct result of the moment that preceded it. Your choices are determined... by your physical makeup, your circumstances and your experiences. Causation is from outside in. Who were your parents? What was their culture? What have you eaten? How is your health? How do people react to your appearance? What music moves you? What foods taste good to you? You don't have any say in any of it. You can do what you want but you can't choose what you want. To do something else you have to want something else more and every reason has a cause in an infinite regress to your conception.
You are wrong about “fixation” on bottom up. You are just being dismissive. Whether culture or anything else from “Top” affects us, it is still determinism. It’s the environment.
yes, he talks as if the only possibilities are determinism and randomness. That's not really a fact. Yes, it is how bottom-up models work, but its somewhat more complicated that that in logical terms. Problem is: something that looks random from some points of view, is not necessarily random, or completely random.
Except that indeterminism itself doesn't necessarily require that only random chance is at work. Free will, if it exists, would be a non-random form of indeterminism that is being artificially excluded by the premise. That's just circular logic.
Why would we not have free will even though there are underlying physical processes that permit our mental states to occur? I don't see this as an either/or situation.
Every reason that anyone does anything has a cause and each cause has a cause ad infinitum. Each moment is the direct result of the preceding moment. We don't choose to want things. We discover what we want.
No one can take credit for anything in life. All your achievements, success, looks, IQ, genetics, personality, mum and dad, the friends you meet, the way food and drugs effect effect your body and all the hard work that people take credit for all comes from chance and luck. From chance and luck you get your genetics, from this you get all the good and bad that comes your way in life. You do not get to pick and choose who you are as a person. This is a hard pill to swallow for many due to ego and fear, particularly for narcissistic, sociopath and psychopaths who all have the Kanye West god complex thing going on.
I would argue not exclusively chance and luck. This is would require a complete lack of starting conditions and restrictions of actions. Laws of physics provide strict parameters to start and operate within.
The logical deduction at and after 0:44 has elements of cherry picking to it: Let's assume that both the statements "free will is incompatible with determinism" and "free will is incompatible with indeterminism" are true (I don't think they are true, but let's assume they were). Then why does this have to imply that there would be "something wrong with the concept of free will"? Why not the other way around? Why not "there is something wrong with the concept of determinism" and/or "there is something wrong with the concept of indeterminism"?
It's not explicitly stated but implied that by free will they are talking about libertarian free will. This is the idea that our decisions are not a result of any reliable causal process, that despite any reasons we might have for making a choice we can always choose differently without choosing randomly. So the choices are not determined and are not random. The problem with this is that we have no evidence for any process that could produce a result that's neither determined by conditions nor random. Also this definition of free is in terms of what it isn't, rather than what it is. We know what a deterministic result is, and we know what a random result is. We don't have a positive descriptive account of what a 'neither random nor determined' result is. It's just not either of those, fine, but what is it?
What would be "neither determined nor random", @@simonhibbs887 ? There are so many more options than these two! To start with: Determined by who? Who has all the knowledge to predict exactly what would happen with anybody and anything? "It's all determined" is a sneaky way of making an unfounded claim: "Let assume that if everything was objective and material and that everything can be presented as facts and that all the facts where known and that strict causal relationships are 100% responsible for everything that exists and that we know all causal relationships perfectly and that we are able to compute all effects from all facts and all causal relationships". Well, that's a lot of unfounded claims. Remove only one of them and you have another way of seeing the world. Remove more of them and you have a multitude of alternative ways of seeing the world. Free will has a much better *empirical* justification than either determinism or "indeterminism" (actions are the result of "chance").
So first we hear that the will is simply not free. Then without introduction, we hear that consciousness is not free. I think this conversation is incoherent. Are we to assume that free will and consciousness are one and the same? Even more a problem than incoherence is the matter of where choice comes from. According to professor Bloch there are unconscious processes antecedent to the conscious choice. Well, where does this antecedent part come from.? I’m not too impressed with philosophy of mind overall, and when the conversation veers toward neuroscience, I’m just bored. Philosophy of mind is too close to neuroscience, something underlined by the professor when he insisted that any discussion of free will must start with science. I love science, but science is not philosophy and I do not cede ground to it in conversations about free will.
There is detectable mental activity that indicates the outcome of the choice before the person becomes aware of making a choice. Therefore the choice cannot have been made consciously, or come from consciousness. Science is not philosophy, but what do we say when some people argue for philosophical views which are contradicted by evidence?
At the most basic level, free will indicates: An individual, an independent "agent", initiates thoughts, sorts them and "decides" on a decisive thought and acts. But remember the starting point - An "individual", a psychosomatic apparatus, himself/herself , is a mere thought appearing in Consciousness. One thought can neither initiate nor see/chose another thought (that is, free will). Free will is a complete myth and a false notion that is claimed by an individual. Free will is a completely abstract concept void of "real" content and is non-existent.
"a mere thought appearing in Consciousness" - this is not a meaningful expression, no matter how much the likes of Sam Harris keep repeating it. Nothing "appears in consciousness" apart from in a sense which is completely trivial, and therefore from which no conclusions can be drawn.
@@TotalitarianDemocrat Here we are talking about 2 different levels and we both need to understand each other as to which of these "levels" we are referring to. 1. In a state of apparent duality where there is seeming existence of 2 distinct entities - a thought holds its relative reality in the presence of consciousness. However, at no time, is a thought anything other than consciousness in its substance - that is the only reality. 2. At the absolute plane of nondual consciousness - there is no "other" (including thoughts, feelings, percepts etc.) If we do not understand this clearly, anything we utter will appear meaningless to other person.
A little disappointed in that Robert asked that the term “free will” be defined before beginning to discuss if we have it or not, and that was never really done-just danced around. At this point, I think most conversations of free will are useless unless definitions are set down first. My definition of free will is just the ability to make choices from among the options our circumstances and environments open up to us. That seems to me free will enough that we can make choices about the directions we would like our lives to take. Which is not saying, therefore you get to where you want to go. Because as any successful and truly honest person will tell you, in addition to the hard work and striving, luck and chance also play a role-sometimes even overwhelmingly so.
How about we add something to your definition? We make a choice. And we are also able to orientate this choice on reasons. This would also invalidate Ned Block's first objection that freedom and determinism are incompatible. For if I myself (a previous state of my body, as he says) and the reasons I have determine my action, then it is free.
@@dr_shrinker The choice is not simply determined by my preferences alone, but by myself and the reasons that guide me, i.e. it is self-determined. And self-determination is just another word for freedom.
@j.p.budesheim no it's not. Everything about you is determined by your biology, past experiences, and current environmental factors. You didn't choose any of that. You were determined by those factors to do any action or lack of action.
Free will is a self-contradictory concept. The idea is that there is a "selector" who can change his position from A to B or vice versa, for no reason and that this represents the preference of the "selector." If the "selector" changes as a result of a factor external or internal to the "selector", it is that factor, and not the "selector", that is the cause of the change. And if the change occurs arbitrarily without being caused by any factor external or internal to the "selector", the "selector" did not "choose". The "selector" changed his position arbitrarily and without reason. It is not something that the "selector" "chose". When an atom decays, we do not consider that the atom chose to be lead. The problem is the assumption that there is a (supernatural) entity that operates the "selector" according to its criteria. But that does not resolve the contradiction. So, the "selector" is now the soul, the problem is exactly repeated. Does the soul choose according to external or internal factors? Is it chance that dictates the criteria of the soul? No exit.
The concept of unfree will is what interests me. Those idiosyncrasies, funny twitches. Tourettes… people with an uncontrollable urge to sing ‘the hills are alive with the sound of music. Stuff like that.
I don't know, maybe B.F. Skinner said this: It's not how free your will is; it's what your will's "causal powers" are. The amount of "freedom" causal agents have is just identical to the (qualitative) size of their behavioral repertoire (i.e., the number of DIFFERENT kinds of things it can do). There has never been, objectively speaking, another definition for freedom.
One’s will is bound by ones ‘repertoire’. What determines one’s repertoires of choices? So freedom is a set of ‘causal agents’ that Skinner believes is limited. How would Skinner allow for the limitations to be set? Freedom only resides in a limited space that one resides in that can Never be broached? Conclusion is that free will can Never cross beyond the bubble of limited things it can do? Free will in a round room.
Not sure if Skinner actually said what I posted, but as I wrote it, I thought he might have liked the statements (he's no longer around to ask). Further, if he might have liked it, he might have also have said it (and maybe I was unconsciously citing him). However, my use of B.F. Skinner should be construed as a kind of "read-bait". Waxing further. In humans, behavior "repertoire" comes from "memes", which come from our genes that allow for memes to arise (i.e., big brains, and the infrastructure of language). Memes allow phenotypic variation at a much faster pace than genotypic variation allows. The answer to the "Jeopardy question": 'the thing that sets the "repertoire" of human behavior' is actually "positive and negative reinforcement", when B.F. Skinner is playing and gets that question. However, if the "Jeopardy question" had been "the thing that sets the reinforcement value (positive or negative) for human behavior, when such behavior is UNRELATED to the "4 fs" (i.e. fleeing, fighting, feeding, and mating), then the Jeopardy answer to that question (B.F. is still playing) may well have been "what is free will?". It appears that in evolution, some amount of variations have to be tried out to see if anything interesting happens. Evolution couldn't have happened, in the super-accelerated sense that it did for humans, without that. Freedom is just the way variations can be made to happen, and (general) evolution loves variation. I think Steven J. Gould (actually) said the 2nd part of the last sentence. Maybe he said the first part too (but of that I'm unsure)?
Another thought. Block-time would seem to deny free-will. The life of the universe is a record . You are a self-aware needle. You experience the present, remember the past, can speculate on the near future and predict the immediate future. From your perspective your are creating the undulations of the grooves, equating to free will. From the records perspective, it is moving you along a pre-determined path. Both are valid in my opinion.
I can see the validity of both perspectives in many people's lives. Yet if I look at the hundreds of thousands hispanic migrants moving to Anglo-Saxon North America , I cannot follow the tune of their grooves. Breaking open their destiny could be explained by a bold move out of free will, but being unwillingly forced to join the human trafficking caravan could also be argued. Or did they merely skip a record in the jukebox of life?
"Most of what we are is non physical, though, our lowest form is physical. All life on our planet has the lowest form, the Body. Our Body is an Animal and the other type of Body on our planet is a Plant. Bodies are bound absolutely to Natural Law, which is the lowest form of true Law. Natural Law is a localised form of Law and is derived from the Laws of Nature. Natural Law is the finite and specific foundational control structure ordering the actions and interactions of species, members of species, and the material sources of a planet. The lowest non physical form of what we are is the Mind, which is a Process. There are other forms of life on our planet that have both a Body and a Mind, however, so far as we currently know, there are no Plants and only some Animals that have a Body and a Mind. The lowest forms of Mind, Instinct and Emotion, are predominantly bound to Natural Law. The next higher form of Mind is Intellect which is bound predominantly to the Laws of Nature. Intuition, the highest form of Mind, can be bound or not to both Natural Law and the Laws of Nature separately or together, or to higher forms of Law altogether. Intuition is the truest guide for our Selves. The next non physical form of what we are is the Self, which is an Awareness. There are relatively few other forms of life on our planet that have a Self. The Self is not bound to any form of Law other than One's Own Law. It is the only form of Law that cannot be violated. The foundation of what we are is the highest non physical form of what we are. The highest form of what we are is the Being, which is an Existence. The Being is not bound to any form of Law originating within Existence. The Being is bound absolutely to The Law. Existence, and the Laws of Nature which are the finite and specific foundational control structure ordering the actions and interactions of all elements within Existence, cannot Be without The Law being The Law. So, what is The Law? In a word, The Law is options. Definition option: a thing that is or may be chosen. The word 'option' does convey the idea of The Law in its most basic sense but does not clarify all of what The Law is. Free Will does describe how our species experiences The Law but does not convey all of what The Law is. In clarifying what The Law is; The capitalised form of the word 'The' indicates the following noun is a specific thing. Law is the finite and specific foundational control structure ordering the actions and interactions of all elements subordinate. Together, the words 'The' and 'Law' (in that exact order,) is a proper noun indicating; the singular form of Law that all other forms of Law and all other Laws are founded upon, the singular foundation upon which Existence is founded, the singular foundation upon which Non Existence is founded, the singular foundation connecting Existence to Non Existence, the concept of options, and Free Will. However one thinks, believes, guesses, hopes, or "knows", whether by a Big Bang, a creation story, a computer program, an expansion of consciousness, or whatever means by which Existence could have come to Be, the option for Existence to not Be also exists. Existence and Non Existence, the original options connected by the very concept of options, connected by The Law. Outside of space and before time. Extra-Existential. As we experience The Law in our Being, The Law is Free Will. The First Protector of The Law is Freely Given Consent. The First Violation of The Law is Theft of Consent." - Goho-tekina Otoko
@@nolanr1400 So if someone murders your children, then no responsibility? No punishment? Just maybe some therapy so we can understand what caused them to murder them?
We can only be responsible for acts that are a direct and reliable consequence of our mental state. That requires determinism. If you ask someone why they made some considered, deliberate choice they will give an account in terms of their preferences, desires, fears, the information they evaluated and how they did so, etc and how those lead to their choice. That account only makes sense under a deterministic framework.
Another reason I have for thinking we don’t really have free will is that it is actually a silly self-referentially incoherent idea. If we have free will, we don’t really choose to have it. If we turn to free will itself and reflect on how we come to have it, we realize that we really have no control over having or not having it. We have no choice but to have it. In other words, free will itself is determined, which makes the idea self-referentially incoherent. It cannot be true both that we have free will and that free will is determined.
I was right with you until "free will itself is determined." Wouldn't it make more sense to say that "free will itself is a feature of the universe?" Otherwise, the natural question will be, "Who made this determination?" or "Did the particle interaction have a preference?" To determine an outcome, one must have a preferred goal in mind, otherwise it is just nature doing its thing.
@@lukeatmyas I've found that if you approach the subject from the idea of personal responsibility or blameworthiness, then you end up confused, but only because the premise is flawed. If you wonder whether it is physically impossible to do anything but the one thing that you end up doing, then it isn't confusing at all. We don't live in a deterministic universe, so the parts do not control the whole and the past does not control the present, which means that your choice is a part of the functioning of the universe, and since you are doing what you want, it's reasonable to call it free will. Trying to find Ultimate Responsibility is also incoherent because we don't have an Ultimate Judge. We only have a physical world that features reliable causation which allows for life to do things that are not controlled by particle interactions. In fact, nothing is controlled by particle interactions since particles are passive objects that don't control anything. Sorry Sabine.
Why is he talking about coercion by violence (a gun to one's head)? That has nothing to do with free will, philosophically. It simply imposes an imminent choice between obeying the gun wielder or disobeying.
The question has one answer and that is, Yes and no. It is a question designed to open up an unlimited potential of interviews. It is therefore designed for its entertainment value and has nothing to do with "truth".
could a sense of free will come from having time and energy in the brain to do something? indeterminism in quantum waves / fields has time / energy uncertainty that might produce sense of free will? maybe part of the "unconscious" element prior to "conscious" action in brain?
I think It's just a matter of how in control we feel, and how our choice reflects our relative desires. It's just how those desires are ballanced. There are basically four scenarios relating to our sense of free will. One is when we face a choice and know immediately what choice we want to make, perhaps due to a previous commitment or because we have a preconceived preference. If at all possible I will choose to make myself a cup of tea in the morning. It's still a free choice, I'm not being forced to do it, but I will do it if I can. The other category is where I have a choice and I am uncertain what i will choose until I do so. I need to go through a process of consideration and evaluation first, and until I've done that I don't know the outcome. For example when deciding on my move in a strategy game where I'm not sure what the best move is. Thirdly there's the case where my range of choice is constrained. Will I go to work on Tuesday? It's possible that I won't, but it's largely not a decision that's in my power to just decide by myself. I'm under an obligation, but it was a freely chosen obligation. Finally there's the case where I genuinely don't have much in the way of a choice at all. If I were arrested for some crime for example, some might try to resist arrest and they have that choice, but it's really not much of a choice.
The foundation of human thought: There are three types of truth: that which we believe to be true, that which we know to be true, and that which we think to be true. These are the three realms of thought: religion, science and philosophy. Do not expect to understand everything unless you approach gaining knowledge as a philosopher. The thought is either right or wrong. The action is either good or evil. It is evil to advance the self by exploiting others. There are only two general choices: dominate or cooperate. One leads to destruction. The other leads to a better life for all. Rather than trying to dominate, we must all work together to insure justice for all people. Do no harm except in self defense. Protect all from harm where possible.
About Philosophy: Philosophy is the process for discovering true knowledge. Philosophy is the collection of true knowledge. The objective of philosophy is to determine what is right, not who is right. The goal of a philosophical discussion should be to reach agreement. An assertion should be found to be: true, not true, or unknown. The purpose of philosophy is to establish a rational world view to be used for making decisions. Do not expect to understand everything unless you approach gaining knowledge as a philosopher. The most significant contribution to humankind of Philosophy is the realization that what holds a person back from finding truth is their own false beliefs. We need to validate our basic assumptions from time to time.
Assumption Based Philosophy: A practical philosophy which supports humans making well informed decisions must be assumption based. Many philosophical assertions resolve to unknown. It is difficult to make decisions if there is no knowledge about which path to take when coming to a decision point. If we restrict our philosophy to the real world, we can build a knowledge based on a foundation of a limited set of assumptions. A practical philosophy is bounded by the unknown. We can make decisions while inside of this boundary; but, have no reliable knowledge outside of the boundary. Premise: The key assumption: The world we are meant to understand is delivered by our senses.
Free Will simply means that the human individual is under no external control of the ability to make choices. The individual has total control over the processing of the reaction to external stimulation. There are two choices: either individuals have free will and are therefore responsible for their actions or every action is predetermined. The world would be a very dull place if every action of every living creature were predetermined. Therefore, we can just assume that all living things react to conditions in the environment and have control over the reaction to change in the environment. Thus, humans have free will and need to use intelligence to make the best decisions in their own best interest.
You have choice without control of what to choose from or if that choice effects what happens at all .. Will is control of what is And Choice is an assertion of what you would prefer having questionable impact on the result
The better people can see the connections, reasons and backgrounds the more we have challenges to keep the sense of responsibility alert. They are two different dimensions.
To paraphrase Alex O'Connor: You only do things for two reasons. You want to... or you're forced to. Force is not freedom and you can't choose what you want. You just do. You can't choose to prefer ice cream to broccoli. You discover it.
Probability, not incompatible with anything, freewill is just the ability to {recognize/ or not} choices. at small enough scales determinism fails, this feeds a probabilistic result to larger scales, it's when we recognize that it takes a preponderance of events to be causal, that we see there is no real mystery to having a choice. Freewill is only an illusion when it is attached to religious reasoning, attached to probability the mystery disappears.
Determinism fails? How? When? At small scales either your condition made from previous causes decides or you decide to make a random decision for the same reason. There is no example or explanation here of anything but determinism. Would love to hear one.
@@ihatespam2 According to quantum mechanics, the behavior of particles at the subatomic level is probabilistic rather than deterministic, at it's root the universe is probabilistic not deterministic. This is why when you flip a coin 100 times you don't get 50h/50t every time. You can run any question related to this on physics stack exchange, I'm sure there is someone with the patience to explain it.
@@brianstevens3858quantum mechanics is not indeterministic, and even if it was, you don't control how your quarks move... Absolutely nothing to do with free will
@@Cal96729 a. Quantum mechanics has a deterministic Schrödinger equation for the wave function. The Göttingen-Copenhagen statistical interpretation is based on the Born Rule that interprets the wave function as a “probability amplitude.” A precept of this interpretation is the lack of determinism in quantum mechanics. b, the choices a person makes is entirely dependent on the choice available, thus dependent on natural laws, the point being the ability to choose a supernatural explanation is an illusion, since the supernatural does not in fact come into play at any scale whatsoever. Now do you see what the point was?
determinism as states being ordered as functions of the other time slices and so on is a slightly broader version of determinism than that, basically any set of states in order has such a function no matter how strange it is, so even in-determinism can't escape that definition if the outcomes are specific in any sense, now no possible definition of indeterminism can or has gone past that, either you split the world into a tree of outcomes or you say random thing happen not a function of the previous state in the same way it is in newtonian physics for example, but in either case you have a spesific state before and after any moment, and so we are stuck with only being able to come up with weakly deterministic hypotheticals, the notion of indeterminism can't even in principle escape this kind of weak determinism, and so it is garuanteed to be the same kind of problem for both kinds of lack of free will.
Block is spot on, libertarian free will is incoherent, because what we will is determined by our genetics and the environment acting on us. In the same way a mountain is the result of the forces that molded it, along with the weather and erosion it is subject to… There is no problem of free will. IOW “you can do what you will, but you can’t will what you will” (Schopenhauer)
Might it be that free will is so pervasive, so everywhere and that we are so immersed in it, that we don't see it? The relationship between choice, association (Peirce), desire and need. The 'knowing how to be' that must necessarily confront every agent, right down to the subatomic. Something to contemplate in the new year.
The universe is random and chaotic, so that it keeps generating information. Hence we should abandon the medieval and mechanistic either/or approaches when trying to understand things. There are tendencies which lead to unpredictable events which later on feed our brain which in turn generate random epigenetic consequences (like the albino babies in Africa being born immune to malaria, but being considered evil by the culture and so on).
You don't have free will unless you bend the definition to mean something different than what it's generally agreed upon. To have been able to have made a different choice than you did, at any given moment. Lots of hopium and copium going an around this topic, and it's funny to me to think that the misunderstanding of it all is determined or random too 😆 Still open to potential evidence or logic that overturns this for me but not looking likely.. There's also a paradox that I feel more free somehow knowing there's no real freedom Bizarre world we're in alright. Have a good new year!
Free Will? Confronted to a moral dilema you can always choose. A different story is that not the 2 elections have equal consequences, introducing pressure in the election: Convenient or just ?
mental processes are in part fractal at the neuronal level so it isn't that we "choose" to do something it is that neural activity tends towards an action but it's not "free" in that sense since it is subject to the underlying baseline of neural activity...a bit like in quantum mechanics there's an underlying probability function...just my own view
In many near death experiences people describe observing their body and not recognizing it as their own body. They are able to make choices like moving their awareness to a hospital waiting room to observe their loved ones while their body is in the surgical operating room. Many NDE’s also describe desperately wanting to stay in Heaven with Jesus but Jesus sends them back into their bodies.
Super excellent discussion. Wondering if more time can be spent on discussing the consequences of Free Will not existing; however, did enjoy the edge of presentation possibility as to whether the universe itself has free will at all. If “absolute determinism” is a force, does the past, present, or future even exist? If it is the case that the past was never there as it was seen, how are thoughts affected by determinism? I hope this interview comes around again with more information. Probably, I will never look at mathematical randomness quite the same way again.
What if determinism isn't a coherent idea? Do the parts control the whole? Does the small control the large? Does the past control the present? Do particle interactions control the macro world? I think the answer to all of these is no, so what is being determined and who is doing the determining?
In principle, indeterminism is compatible with free will. Indeterminism does not necessarily mean that we do something by chance. It only means that we do not know how the event happens. Many proponents of free will rely on this, as well as relying on intuition. Free will requires the ability to do things (including produce thoughts), other than we do them, in the circumstances we do them. Redefining free will because we do not like there being no free will is a cop out and would be misleading. Free will requires having the ability to determine the outcome of at least some events that are otherwise indeterminant (hence the notion of magic or someone else inside that some speak of). As something distinct from the rest of the environment we make our own decisions. However, those decisions are influenced by the totality of the environment, including our physical selves. It happens that the ever-increasing objective evidence is against the proponents of free will who rely entirely on intuition and just don’t like the feeling of not having free will.
energy in quantum waves at faster than speed of light are at least indeterminist, not determined; any consciousness in quantum waves / fields would not be deterministic?
We're deterministic machines but can behave indeterministically by using random input sources when making our decisions. When we act against what our brains suggests as a result of such randomness we get the illusion of free will. We only act against our training when the cost of doing so is not that great. We behave indeterministically only to experience.
I think the people are logical, and they will do what seems logical to do and what they believe is in their best interest. But they can choose to not do something if they don't feel like doing it. No one lives as though they believe that they aren't free. I just don't believe anyone who sits in front of a camera as an learned man or woman and says that we don't have free will actually believes that they aren't free to just do what they want to do at any given moments notice. If they do, then they aren't human and they are agents of the matrix, and NPCs. I'm will to concede that there may be are percentage of people on this planet that are NPCs and aren't there own person but represent the background energy of the planet. But there is no way in hell that I believe that people live as though they believe that they aren't free. It's Godeols Incompleteness theorem. There will always be things that are true that can't be proven why they are true. Free will is one of those things. Deep down inside we all know that we make choices ... those of us who are actually human.
*Second Attempt:* Humans have the free will to *personally select* from a series of options. That is the extent of our free will. Particles and other inanimate "stuff" have no other option than to do whatever it is that they do. That's the difference and why we have free will. ... Those who claim that we don't - or say, _"You can't choose your preferences!"_ ... or ... _"You can't choose to choose what you choose to choose!"_ are merely succumbing to semantic obfuscation. I am surprised at how many people continue to waste everyone's time claiming there's some "deterministic demon" hiding behind the curtain creating the "illusion" of free will. As "The Wizard of Oz" taught us, ... *_"Pay no attention to the deterministic demon behind the curtain!_*
All options presented are tethered to their prior causes and the one you ‘choose’ will not be due to a free willed choice. It was the one you were going to choose based on prior causes. Period. There is no wiggling out of physics.
@@ajohnson929 *"All options presented are tethered to their prior causes and the one you ‘choose’ will not be due to a free willed choice."* ... The only way you can make a decision is to first be presented with options. Arguing that our decisions are "tethered" to whatever generates the options is nothing more than needless obfuscation. *" It was the one you were going to choose based on prior causes. Period."* ... I am presented with a choice between vanilla or chocolate. Although I _could_ choose vanilla or neither, I choose chocolate. ... End of story. To claim otherwise is pure nonsense. Claiming that I had no other option than to choose chocolate is believing in the _"deterministic demon hiding behind the curtain."_ You are presenting the typical unfalsifiable talking points that come from the many faithful believers of the "Church of Hard Determinism."
@@ajohnson929 Living matter wiggled out of non living matter. And with that, wiggled out of being fully bound to the deterministic world they emerged out of. What precludes something emerging within a deterministic system that is no longer completely causally bound to that system? but rather is now capable of choosing from different options and possibilities the environment opens up to it? Especially, in light of having the ability to make such choices, seeming to be so clearly beneficial for adaptation and survival in that environment?
>"I am surprised at how many people continue to waste everyone's time claiming there's some "deterministic demon" hiding behind the curtain creating the "illusion" of free will. I have not seen anyone here ever claim this, or anything like it.
Do you choose something with reason or without reason? If you choose something for a certain reason, that was the cause of your choice. But if you decide to change the decision that seemed most reasonable to you for a different one, then the latter is the one that seems most reasonable to you. You could choose things that harm you, but if you decide that, that is the choice that seems most reasonable to you. You may think that you are capable of choosing something at random but that is an illusion. When you choose at random, your brain tends toward one of the options for reasons that are beyond your awareness but were still a factor in the decision. On the other hand, assuming that one capriciously chooses among options cannot be called an exercise of will. Random actions are not something guided by will.
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd Thank you for your thought. I differ. I think that it can be called an exercise of free will to choose capriciously. I think that most choices are capricious in a relevant sense. Nearly every decision that I have made in my life has been stupid and irrational, you might say capricious. I think that doesn't mean that my decisions were unfree; I just think that I was stupid and irrational. Philosophers who think that a free decision cannot be capricious are, in a sense, dominated by their own rationality; that's why they became philosophers. I think that, because of their personalities, they are defining free will as necessarily impossible, rather than defining it in a way that might be possible. I see it as futile, or hyper-rationalistic, to define free will out of possible existence.
@@christophergame7977 There is a difference between "choose" and "change status." They are not the same and changing state cannot be called an exercise of will unless we distort the meaning of human will. Changing state arbitrarily requires an arbitrary factor and this in turn requires another, ad infinitum. An arbitrary decision does not solve the problem.
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd Thank you for your thoughts. It comes to a definition of free will. For me, the question is 'what is the willer free from?' For me, the willer is free when no one is compelling him. For you, that question hardly matters, I guess. For you, freedom is a kind of impersonal or intrapersonal metaphysical category, I guess? For me, it's a difference between compulsion and non-compulsion by someone else, a matter of interpersonal relations. For you, I guess, it's a matter purely within the willer?
@@christophergame7977 For me and for almost everyone, free will is the exercise of human will without any type of conditioning. For me, in this context, freedom is that given two equally possible choices, the chooser is not obliged to choose one in particular. You are FREE to choose either of the two in equal measure. I agree with you that someone forcing you to make a certain choice prevents the exercise of your free will (if this had been possible). But to me, any factor that unbalances one's ability to choose between the two options, in equal measure, prevents one from using their free will. And all people are affected by factors that prevent them from choosing between options to the same extent. Choosing is the result of factors.
Concise and compelling view. Free will seems obviously to exist and yet physics and neuroscience tells us that it obviously does not exist. It does seem that science and common sense are talking about different things, and Block's "diminished" view of free will bridges the gap convincingly
Physics and neuroscience tells us what exactly? Does it tell us that macro structures like brains don't actually do anything since all the decisions are made at the level of particle interactions? Or does it tell us that nature spent huge effort and resources to make brains specifically so that they could generate behaviors that we anticipate will move us toward specified goals?
Depends on who you ask, I guess! Neuroscience generally claims that consciousness and decision making arise from the brain, so that ultimately neurons and the connections between them determine what we do. Physics just takes it one step further with the idea that everything in the brain can be described with precision by the laws of quantum theory. In other words, whatever we do is governed by what the particles in our brain are going to do: we can never compel the particles that make up our brains to do something that goes against these laws. But in my view, although the argument is solid, it is not very satisfying and seems to miss the point. I like your second possibility… @@caricue
@@caricueyou're just describing the same thing at different levels of abstraction. No incompatibility there. And nature is not teleological, it doesn't have a "goal". You're a cosmic accident. That's it.
If you define indeterminism as chance, then consciousness is neither deterministic nor indeterministic. Consciousness works with an informed decision making process for which we are held accountable. Again biblically, consciousness is not the same as soul. It is true, of course, that there can be no absolute freewill.
First of all... any human's birth was not decided by him/her/them, as in which country, gender family, economic and social strata, race, sexual orientation, level of freedom , he or she or they ll be born with..!!! So, how can u even talk about free will...? Could those of whom, who have excelled in their lives coz of the progress that they made, really do so if they were not born at a particular place at a particular time... ??? So, where's the free will...? Would u be making these videos if the universe didn't conspire it??? And if u refuse to make any more videos, would it be you, or would it be the universe again propelling u to take such a decision...?? There's nothing like free will...Period. Even ur decisions are not truely yours... coz they propel ur life towards a pre-determined outcome!!!
even in void our thoughts will be "influenced" by being in void. There is no total free will, even the actions of God would be "influenced" by what he created. Maybe the initial thought that could have created reality was totally free, if ever existed. But also there is some free will actions, because morality depends on it. And the most important thing in the reality cant be an illusion. That would require a too precise deterministic rollback to the initial conditions.
🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM: Just as the autonomous beating of one's heart is governed by one's genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and environmental conditioning. This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the author of our thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few persons extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will. Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if one, for example, is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally-desirable as the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart! So, in both of the aforementioned examples, there is a pre-existing preference (at a given point in time) for one particular dish or pet. Even if a person liked cats and dogs EQUALLY, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice isn’t made freely, but entirely based upon the person’s genetic code plus the individual's up-to-date conditioning. True equality is non-existent in the phenomenal sphere. The most common argument against determinism is that humans (unlike other animals) have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which one to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”. Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a dream in the “mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how an action performed in the present is the result of a chain of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity). At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect. The genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception. University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent phenomenon, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings. If any particular volitional act was not caused by the preceding thoughts and actions, then the only alternative explanation would be due to RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists claim that subatomic particles can randomly move in space, but true randomness cannot occur in a deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that two motor vehicles colliding together was the result of pure chance (therefore the term “accident”), quantum physicists are unable to see that the seeming randomness of quantum particles are, in fact, somehow determined by each and every preceding action which led-up to the act in question. It is a known scientific fact that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software program is able to make the decision to generate a number at “random”. We did not choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, and most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic code) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle). Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being. If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds. The IMPRESSION that we have free-will can be considered a “Gift of Life” or “God’s Grace”, otherwise, we may be resentful of our lack of free-will, since, unlike other creatures, we humans have the intelligence to comprehend our own existence. Even an enlightened sage, who has fully realized that he is not the author of his thoughts and actions, is not conscious of his lack of volition at every moment of his day. At best, he may recall his lack of freedom during those times where suffering (as opposed to mere pain) begins to creep-in to the mind or intellect. Many, if not most scientists, particularly academic philosophers and physicists, accept determinism to be the most logical and reasonable alternative to free-will, but it seems, at least anecdotally, that they rarely (if ever) live their lives conscious of the fact that their daily actions are fated. Cont...
@@JagadguruSvamiVegananda next time make your free will choice to not copy and paste as a reply. i know that it's classic for those pseudo-wise people to sit on a pillow and mortally annoying the adoring crowd with verbose nonsense but here we are two and politely you should discuss with me, not copy and paste. You surely think that this reply was written in the initial conditions of the universe so accept it ...
How would you prove scientifically that will can be modelled using only randomness, determinisism ( or a mix of the two) ? Isn't it an argument from ignorance or lack of imagination? It seems to be rooted in presumptions from an overly self confident scientistic worldview.
Unless, perhaps, consciousness isn't bound by time. It already spends a lot of its energy in the past, and a little in the present... if it somehow was able to exist in the future, we would have answers to things like the apparent pre-loading of our choices.
In life nothing is one way. I’ve always said life is like a mosaic. Who and how we think today from politics to our beliefs on afterlife, God or life in the cosmos changes. With free will or not that too is a mosaic. There is free will but it’s like a music sheet that works in tandem with determinism. Our make up on how we think is layered, ancestrial collective conscious that’s inherited, cultural identity, gender, personal experiences, environment all work in tandem to influence the outcome but there is a small space remaining for free will. The space between stimulus and response. Victor Frankl.
The free will is subjective feeling. It is religious invention. It is invented to wash away the problem of eternal punishment in religion: it is easier to blame and scare people ”in the name of God” if the decision of belief would be based on free will.
Free will is a subjective feeling, but it is not a religious invention. Ihe idea has often been misused by religion for its own purposes. We make decisions and we are aware that we do so. There is not prima facie reason to question that the decisions are made freely, and generally we do not often do so. When we question it, the objective evidence mounts against us having free will. It is hard to let go.
Everyone I've ever seen on this show was clueless. Questions like this are unanswerable from a physicalist perspective. A semantic theory is necessary, but almost no one today even knows what that is.
- TH-cam, Sabine Hossenfelder, You don’t have free will but don’t worry. - TH-cam, Cosmic Skeptic, Why free will doesn’t exist. - TH-cam, The University of Chicago, Do we really have free will? with Robert Sapolsky
OH NO! He wants to use SCIENCE to determine understandings! Kinda blows this channel out. To paraphrase what I remember from B.F. Skinner long ago, Lacking Free Will does not mean we should not try to swim back to the boat when we fall over.
These free will conversations are just a bunch of intellectual masturbation. I'm not a robot. I can look at my options, and decide what to choose. I can also choose my life path and aim for it. We are all subject to influences, and we are all somewhat shaped in various ways through life and our experiences. I always have the option to choose, or not choose at all. Free will used to be thought of as the ability to freely choose from your options, and now it has all these nuances and new think bullshxt added onto it. According to the highest form of free will, it is literally impossible to exist no matter what framework it's under. Not even a god that's not limited to it's nature of love or honesty could have free will, because there is some form of contradiction it cannot over come, or a road it cannot come back from, like overcoming a permanent self deletion. But to bring everyone back to earth with both feet on the ground, I had the ability to choose to leave a comment or not. My ego influenced me, which it doesn't always have power over me. I can control it, but I chose not too. People have options and choices to make. There is no one forcing my hand against my desire every second of the day. This debate is so dumb.
I often point out the uselessness of debating free will since no matter what you believe, you will still live your life as if you have free will. As Phillip K Dick said so eloquently, "Reality is that which, once you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Eternity allowed for the potential of a universe which had the potential for intelligent, self-aware life to develop. Life without free will is a gross joke. There are at any moment an infinite number of factors that impress themselves on existence, including us. Understanding the meaning of the mechanism does not explain the output. Free-will? Certainly. It is what Eternity intended.
Thinking that we actually deserve all the suffering in the world is a cruel joke. Free will is the illusion of choice. We only do what we want but we can't choose what we want. Things happen and we discover what we want.
Ned commits the same basic mistake so many do: he thinks determined and random are true dichotomy. They aren't. All of his analysis and arguments are a house of cards from this error.
We have evidence for deterministic cause and effect, and we have evidence for random causation. Do you have any evidence for causation that is neither?
@@simonhibbs887 what do you consider "evidence"? If the only thing you consider "evidence" is physical things in a causal deterministic framework then you're simply begging the question.
@@robertsaget9697 I think the false dichotomy you’re attributing to Block is imprecise, but I do agree that this is such an important point. Block initially presents a perfectly reasonable dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism, but then overreaches when he moves to what each pole of that dichotomy entails. Whilst determinism does entail fixed/predictable outcomes, indeterminism does not automatically entail randomness, which I believe is your point. If the universe contains intelligent agents that have the power to influence events (which is a loose definition of what we tend to label ‘free will’), then an indeterministic universe could have direction imposed on it by those agents. In other words, indeterminism only entails randomness in a universe with no intelligent, influencing agents (i.e. a universe of only mindless matter and void), which is the very issue being discussed. His move from indeterminism to randomness presupposes an absence of free will, and so cannot be used to argue against it.
Free Will is absolutely fundamental in our consciousness and in the universe. We use it in every choice we make. Quantum probabilities in your brain make determinism impossible. Free will decisions that you make, are made in an infinite number of ways, but they all come down to just two things, logic and emotion, with an infinite number of ways that they are weighted and combined to reach a decision. Think of emotion as being more of an animalistic drive for what you want, and logic as being what you determine to be the best choice for you, either morally or physically. There are an infinite number of combinations that will lead you to a decision. The idea that you could predict that or that it could be predetermined is ridiculous! Some will be beneficial for you and some will not. If you tend to give in to emotion, it makes you much more likely to develop addictions to what gives you pleasure or makes you feel good. On the other hand, always following logic makes you more methodical and less animalistic. Both are needed in infinitely varying degrees to make you wholly human, but the more you understand them, the easier it is to recognize attempts at manipulation, and avoid having your consent modified and manufactured by it, in different forms of advertising and persuasion thrust upon you by others and by media.
Free will does not explain why we want what we want. We just do. Things happen and we realize we want something and that is what we do. To suggest otherwise is to suggest we do things for no reason at all but we do everything for a reason and each reason has a cause and every cause has a cause. Every moment is a direct result of the previous moment.
@@lrvogt1257 That assumption is just not true. The reason you are wrong about this is because the brain is not perfect, ever, and it doesn't control you body perfectly either. It is all based on averages and quantum probabilities that are NOT determined, ever, before an action happens, and then there is the response to the unexpected result! Are we conditioned to want and like things? Sure we are, but you have the free will and ability to change that.
@@michaelbartlett6864 : The brain is far from perfect but it does control your actions even if some functions are automatic or dysfunctional. That has nothing to do with will. Quantum physics is deterministic and random events have nothing to do with will. They may have unknown origins but they affect the world deterministically. You can't will yourself to want what you don't want for no reason at all but you can want something else more and that is what you'll act on.
@@lrvogt1257 Do you really believe that everything since the dawn of the universe, including your own conception and all the events that led to your becoming sentient, were all predetermined and that exactly what is going to happen in the forever future is already determined? Think about that - the single snowflake, which doesn't exist yet, is predetermined by its weight to cause a roof to collapse or a branch of a tree to break. That is what you're saying!
So far you’ve done and said nothing and then mocked everyone for questing it. You mocked Ned to start with, now back it up. Say something intelligent to disprove the idea of no free will.
Its hilarious how unconscious godless mindless purposeless inconsequential determinist meatsticks delusionally imagines itself a sentient human by pretending to presuppose and adopt the worldview of sentient intellectually self-aware humans with the GOD-given gift of libertarian free-will so as to then fantasize about engaging in argumentation around subjects it doesn’t even believe its capable of believing in!
"You" aren't a disembodied deciding machine. The guest makes an exception for people with brain damage, but that's absurd. Your brain isn't an appliance that " you" use. YOU ARE your kidneys and thumbs and skin and brains - in whatever condition they're in. Your thoughts and awareness and will are only a miniscule part of the thing you are. I think more than half of the "problem" of free will is a misunderstanding of what a person is in the first place. You're more like a large city than like an individual, detached, rational agent. Do cities have "free will?"
I don't think cities have will of any sort. Maybe they do, but I have never thought about it before. The ability to determine future events is only possible by physicality. Only physical process can determine other physical processes. To decide to eat one flavor over the other is a physical process, because eating vanilla is a future, physical process. Moreover, from a different tact....all choices are either determined or random choice, neither entails freedom of will. The definition of freewill is the notion of making unimpeded choices. EX. If a blind person isn't able to decide color preferences because of an inability to see color, their choice is impeded.
@@dr_shrinker The physics that describes why someone chooses burger king instead of taco bell are a lot harder to explain than the imagination-world causes, which might be that they're going to a job interview and they associate taco bell with flatulence. "Job interview" is not exactly a fundamental particle. All that mental activity is a physical process, but it's also an information-al process, and information follows different rules. Is it only true that a chicken crosses the road because of some neuron that fired? Is it not also true (or even more true?) that it crossed to get to the other side? So I think there may be room for some kind of top-down compatiblism.
@@bozo5632 I disagree. Information doesn’t follow different rules. Information does not do anything. It’s passive, not active. Red, hot, and 8 do nothing. I’m being literal here, but I’m still correct. Information is a reflection (or label) we use to define physical processes and as such, it is the processes that make the rules. 2 by itself is nothing but a bunch of pixels on my iPad. -- but if I use two to count the number of apples, the “two” becomes a label. If I have two more apples, we label it as four. The information is not following a different rule than physics, it describes physics. Information cannot deviate from physics, only our misperception of it can. - again, showing our will is impeded. My point is, physical processes can only determine future events, in ALL facets. The reasons one likes taco bell over BK might be hard to explain, physically, but they can be explained physically….even if just in principle.
@@dr_shrinker I don't dispute the physicality part of it. Information has no separate existence on its own - it must be encoded in the physical world. (Some people would disagree, but I'm sure they're mistaken.) But information does follow different rules. A logical proposition is a logic equation, not a physics equation. Physics/nature doesn't add or subtract or take averages, but we do. It's a different sort of thing, governed by different rules. I don't know if that really makes space for (some version of) free will or not, but I think it might.
I'll answer that question. I clicked on this video just to answer the question even though I was curious about the content. Yes, we have freewill and I proved it by clicking off right after typing my comment even though I wanted to hear what was said.
Obviously some in academia have been confused by this to the point they don't want to categorize & properly label what they mean. This a great task for a new generation and paradigm to work on. The entire system on a macro scale has a deterministic out come even though it can never define where any qauntative micro will be at any given point. Under the chaldean model and cosmogony your absolved by humanist expression. This means if you grant newtonian deterministic simplicity to the big bang evolutionary higherachy then it pushes the infinite sums of approximating complexity down upon you and me. This is what we've temporarily done under 1900s structuralism. We treat anti realism as realism the way naturalist , prescription of absolute space ,with absolute horizontal time even though this is not what Einstein or newton is saying. We definitely are a human dashboard, a triality of self that is navagating that dualistic model but we can re allocate deterministic values where we choose. We can push the infinite sums of approximating complexity out into infinite space and universe with prescriptions or non deterministic quantitative outcomes. We've proven this throughout history with many different notions of time , granted many different prescriptions rationalizing the world around us with many different interpretations
Chaldean mindset is the wrong one to use on the mind. The basian model may map this line of thought but it doesn't map all neural architecture. We can simply plagiarize Jesus salvational unification of the tripartite nature of man, or hibber space math and lay it over the brain to unify the classical and qauntom physics but ,again this is plagiarizing lol Its definitely a free will individual but I would agree many aren't, they're just acting out no different than computation would.
We always have the comforting thought, we are free to commit suicide. I question was it just better not to know any of this, someone evil will only use it against your pursuit of happiness.
Remaining deluded is never better. The “free to commit suicide” comment exhibits the misunderstanding of free which keeps the illusion alive in most minds. Free doesn’t mean, no one will stop you, or the external world doesn’t present any obstacles. It means your internal decision making can’t be free from everything that came before creating the conditions in which your decisions are made. Try this, you are free to pick a religion, right? So, right now, pick a religion you do not believe and start believing in it. Not just on the surface, genuinely be convinced. You can’t do it.
@@ihatespam2I could pick a religion of the line of Abraham, getting from one to two and then three. I would guess there is a logical line to follow but I have already eaten from the tree of knowledge and found myself naked and self aware. Maybe a western form of Buddhism were the beliefs fit with my lifestyle, how ever sinful it maybe. Something pagan with runic symbolism believing that sort of thing could take your eye out. A modern religion based on selfishness, gender and environment is it called wokeism or just post-modern, well there is as many isms as genders in this one. It was not lost on me I was just being flippant. As some far smarter that I once said”it’s not understanding why people suffer psychosis, it’s understanding why more people don’t suffer from it” I guess for every action there is a reaction. I believe ignorance is bliss and sometimes it is better not to know.
@@truefact844 not sure what this is a response to, but wow, almost everything you said is problematic. I would love to know what sin you think I am guilty of and what you think a sin is?
@@ihatespam2you asked me to pick a religion I don’t believe in and try to believe it. I was trying to say maybe not in the most elegant way, which religion? If I was to believe something that I could frame in a way that it was the perfect fit, like the western version of Buddhism which seems to mean do a little yoga, treat everyone with respect but I guess it’s more of a philosophy. If what you were asking was not possible as you’re trying to suggest, we would not have any cults. I was not in any way saying you are sinful and I am truly sorry if that was the way what I wrote made you feel. As to sin, what do you believe it is, then I maybe able to explain why you felt I was suggesting you somehow had managed to fall into it? If I was looking to you suggest what you mean by religion and G.O.D. Why would that be problematic? We could say that Jung’s father questioning his faith in G.O.D. and at the end of his life, feeling that he had completely lost his faith. Jung’s life’s work was to know enough about the psychological makeup of humanity, only to prove to himself that his father’s life was not wasted on a false belief. Jung when asked if he believes in G.O.D. Said believe,I know. Would it not be reductive to say all that work was just for one question, no matter how broad that question was?
I can answer this very easily, Humans don't have free will, because humans don't actually exist. I know, you don't believe me, it sounds ridiculous to you, but I assure you there are no humans, no people. There is nothing here but Consciousness doing it's dance. That is what you are, Consciousness, or call it Awareness, or Life, whatever you prefer, but anything that exists in a perceived physical realm is merely Consciousness expressing itself as an object including humans. The outside world and all in it are made up of the same stuff as the believable world you create each night in your own dreams. It's all you and only you, and you are Consciousness.
Free will is simply a social term, it is the ability for a person to make choices without other people’s unwanted interference. It has nothing to do with philosophy or biology etc. It is merely a concept for people to help distinguish individuals behavior from a group. If you go to court the judge isn’t going to factor in determinism.
Your soul and free will arises from the quantum wave from which the particle like nature of you body arises. The whole universe arises from the quantum wave which is the source of all.
@@markb3786 Let's start slow. Your body was assembled by vibrating, self assembling microtubules, messing around with your parent's DNA. m.th-cam.com/video/N97cgUqV0Cg/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/X_tYrnv_o6A/w-d-xo.html
@@markb3786 Experiments have shown that memories are not stored only in the brain, since the immortal flatworm planeria (composed of 20% stem cells) demonstrate the ability to retain trained behavior after decapitation and given the time to regrow new heads. Under general anesthesia, Planaria also temporarily lose the memory of how to regrow their heads, sometimes regrowing the head of other species. th-cam.com/video/jdtmiz2YG0U/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xtWx9guXM-m5a-TX
@@markb3786 My guess is that the quantum probability wave is consciousness and becomes time constrained within vibrating mesoscopic networks controlling our bodies. th-cam.com/video/sPGZSC8odIU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=fDsQ9oVMu1DuLTwn
Please, I dare you to have a nonstop walk for 7 hours. After this, please try to dislike anyone as your first test. If you do it successfully, let me keep coming back to this world as the Satan people talk about.
Free will, free choice, free deed, free ability... are all different things. An example:
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
This argument is based on premise that the the will to will is out of the set of "Will" , In other words, it assumes the premise that " want to want " does not come under same set of wants/choices
I've been saying a similar thing to myself about free will for quite some time. It's obvious based on life experience we are not totally free in almost every aspect. We have some apparently more free or less free choices. But everything is largely determined by prior events. Thumbs up.
but there is that moment is which you ponder about what to do. If was just due to previous processes then the body would not wait hours, days, months to take a decision. In idealism that "movie" can lead the true consciousness to learn through it ... but i prefer the most simple option and free will really exist.
@@francesco5581 Thanks for your reply. I don't deny the existence of free will or choice. I'm simply agreeing with the professor that free will is limited or constrained and thus not totally free . . . only partially free.
I am afraid that for a pure "tough minded" scientist everything is completely determined by prior events. Pragmatism as per William James is the most effective response.
@@ruskiny280 If you're totally convinced of that point of view . . . no need to be afraid. Just saying.
@@piehound there is no partial. Will and thought are completely determined.
Imagine choosing to have “soup AND salad,”- only to find out the waiter said “soup OR salad.” The physical world determined your choices because you misinterpreted the incoming data. You chose based on your understanding of reality, but the reality was not what you thought it was…..your will was physically determined even though it was wrong. Your ears were the physical determinant where reality went askew. If your will were free, you would have made the correct decision regardless of the faulty intel.
No. You can’t determine what thoughts and preferences you have. Your choices are made based on thoughts beyond your control. That’s where the illusion comes from.
OK. Well, what about meditation - haven't we the Will to cast all our thoughts aside, even if it takes effort and time? From outward direction to the inner direction, that the Wiseman teach.
@@S3RAVA3LMgreat question. 👍🏻I think the act of training yourself to empty your mind is an act motivated by something. To seek enlightenment is a motivation not of your own choice. Something makes a person seek answers and enlightenment, just as something makes other people seek answers in department stores, shopping malls, and churches.
Bodhisttivas practice “no mind” because it was instilled in them by 2,000 years of teachings. To train yourself to empty your mind is not as paramount as the thought “I need to sit and meditate ‘now.” Something physical triggered the thought to sit and empty their mind. But in order to do do, they have to focus on something….breathing or candle light. It takes dedication to empty the mind of thought, but focusing on breathing or candle light is still a thought. I would be interested in seeing the EEG scans of a master in deep meditation to see if their brain is really devoid of electrical activity.
But to control your thoughts, even a Buddhist master cannot control the thoughts they have. Their thoughts define them! If a person is driven to meditate in a zen monastery, and that person is compelled to practice emptying their mind, then their actions label them a zen master. It’s not the other way around. A zem master doesn’t decide to meditate. A serial bank robber doesn’t decide to rob banks. Robbing banks makes them a robber …etc. our thoughts and actions are not ours to decide, but we are labeled and defined by them regardless. Just as a rabid dog is deemed a rabid dog thru no fault of its own.
We have a hierarchy of preferences. We may choose a flavor we don’t like over one we do, but the choice was not made because of our preference for taste, but our preference for some other factor….cost, sight, convenience, allergies….we have preferences and we have preferences of preferences…..on and on.
We always choose our preferences, but we also prioritize our preferences according to importance or whatever.
I might love chocolate but allergic to it. So I prefer not to get sick, over tasting chocolate.
Preferences are not all created equal. The preference for survival over rides my preference for chocolate. My preference for chocolate over rides my preference for cabbage. Etc.
In all cases, we are not free to determine our preferences, nor are we free to choose against them.
4:02 every decision made from awareness inputs is part of higher level processing units and therefore consciousness is directly involved by exercising its ability to act with a certain degree of freedom...
You may do what you want but you can't choose what you want. We only know we've been convinced of something after the fact.
to me, it seems as, awareness has an active role in decision making processes and every decision made is proof of free-will...
@@r2c3 : Being aware that we are making calculations doesn't explain why we make any specific choice. We do what we want but we can only discover what we want. We don't want things for no reason and every reason has a cause and that has a cause etc.
That’s a thought caused by your exposure, not evidence of free will. Just saying it isn’t an argument.
@@lrvogt1257 I'd say, we're able to make a choice only because we're aware of the available options... awareness of making a decision, as a result of evaluating alternatives, is strong evidence of agency and therefore free-will... and yes, causality is clearly part of reality as is our ability to interact with various elements within it...
0:46 ... I think the concept of Free Will is confused the reason it's confused is that free will on the usual concept is incompatible with determinism and it's also incompatible with indeterminism (let's discuss what that means) 0:57 ... 2:24 ❤... because you're defining free will in a diminished way (that's right!) 2:26 ... 5:05 ... but if you are defining consciousness is a purely physical manner which you do (yeah) so therefore it is produced by a whole series of biological events in the past that lead up to the way it is today (right) uh much less much like uh um digestive juices are the product of glands in the stomach or (right) the kidney excreting urine or something like that it's a normal bodily process that are based on these events doesn't that ipsofacto by the same reasoning uh make consciousness uh completely determined 5:46
Free will, the ability to bring up and think about and choose options is a transient ability in between functioning on a habitual basis.
Ned Block's determinism vs indeterminism (randomness) reflects physicalism's fixation with bottom-up causation. What is missing from this conversation is top-down causation. Once we factor in culture as the foundation for our personal identities, it becomes more clear that it is free will - *as the choices that we make from culture* - that wires our neuroplastic brains from the top-down. Refer to yesterday's interview with George Lakoff, discussing metaphor, narratives, emotion, qualia, experience, semiotics. These relate to how we freewill our choices from culture, the top-down causation that teaches us our identities.
Culture only exist as a result of, not a cause of. It actually causes restriction as opposed to expansion of probabilities.
he could then simply say that those top-down effects you speak of are caused by bottom-up processes, it's not like culture came out of nowhere or created itself in an independent manner. Culture obviously influences us to a great deal but the point is exactly that culture is also determined by more fundamental processes.
Every moment is a direct result of the moment that preceded it. Your choices are determined... by your physical makeup, your circumstances and your experiences. Causation is from outside in. Who were your parents? What was their culture? What have you eaten? How is your health? How do people react to your appearance? What music moves you? What foods taste good to you? You don't have any say in any of it. You can do what you want but you can't choose what you want. To do something else you have to want something else more and every reason has a cause in an infinite regress to your conception.
You are wrong about “fixation” on bottom up. You are just being dismissive.
Whether culture or anything else from “Top” affects us, it is still determinism. It’s the environment.
yes, he talks as if the only possibilities are determinism and randomness. That's not really a fact. Yes, it is how bottom-up models work, but its somewhat more complicated that that in logical terms. Problem is: something that looks random from some points of view, is not necessarily random, or completely random.
Except that indeterminism itself doesn't necessarily require that only random chance is at work. Free will, if it exists, would be a non-random form of indeterminism that is being artificially excluded by the premise. That's just circular logic.
Why would we not have free will even though there are underlying physical processes that permit our mental states to occur? I don't see this as an either/or situation.
Every reason that anyone does anything has a cause and each cause has a cause ad infinitum. Each moment is the direct result of the preceding moment. We don't choose to want things. We discover what we want.
No one can take credit for anything in life. All your achievements, success, looks, IQ, genetics, personality, mum and dad, the friends you meet, the way food and drugs effect effect your body and all the hard work that people take credit for all comes from chance and luck. From chance and luck you get your genetics, from this you get all the good and bad that comes your way in life. You do not get to pick and choose who you are as a person. This is a hard pill to swallow for many due to ego and fear, particularly for narcissistic, sociopath and psychopaths who all have the Kanye West god complex thing going on.
I would argue not exclusively chance and luck. This is would require a complete lack of starting conditions and restrictions of actions. Laws of physics provide strict parameters to start and operate within.
@@glenncurry3041you make a claim, but I don’t see or follow any argument for it. Why does this lack on non-lack change anything?
I agree and I'm fortunate enough to live in gratitude for my situation.
@@macklyn “Live in gratitude” means What!?
@@brentbeacham9691 It means I understand life is a gift and I'm thankful for it
We are weilded by the will of our surroundings until we become aware that we can will ourselves into weilding the will of our surroundings
The logical deduction at and after 0:44 has elements of cherry picking to it: Let's assume that both the statements "free will is incompatible with determinism" and "free will is incompatible with indeterminism" are true (I don't think they are true, but let's assume they were). Then why does this have to imply that there would be "something wrong with the concept of free will"? Why not the other way around? Why not "there is something wrong with the concept of determinism" and/or "there is something wrong with the concept of indeterminism"?
It's not explicitly stated but implied that by free will they are talking about libertarian free will. This is the idea that our decisions are not a result of any reliable causal process, that despite any reasons we might have for making a choice we can always choose differently without choosing randomly. So the choices are not determined and are not random. The problem with this is that we have no evidence for any process that could produce a result that's neither determined by conditions nor random. Also this definition of free is in terms of what it isn't, rather than what it is. We know what a deterministic result is, and we know what a random result is. We don't have a positive descriptive account of what a 'neither random nor determined' result is. It's just not either of those, fine, but what is it?
What would be "neither determined nor random", @@simonhibbs887 ? There are so many more options than these two! To start with: Determined by who? Who has all the knowledge to predict exactly what would happen with anybody and anything? "It's all determined" is a sneaky way of making an unfounded claim: "Let assume that if everything was objective and material and that everything can be presented as facts and that all the facts where known and that strict causal relationships are 100% responsible for everything that exists and that we know all causal relationships perfectly and that we are able to compute all effects from all facts and all causal relationships". Well, that's a lot of unfounded claims. Remove only one of them and you have another way of seeing the world. Remove more of them and you have a multitude of alternative ways of seeing the world. Free will has a much better *empirical* justification than either determinism or "indeterminism" (actions are the result of "chance").
So first we hear that the will is simply not free. Then without introduction, we hear that consciousness is not free. I think this conversation is incoherent. Are we to assume that free will and consciousness are one and the same? Even more a problem than incoherence is the matter of where choice comes from. According to professor Bloch there are unconscious processes antecedent to the conscious choice. Well, where does this antecedent part come from.? I’m not too impressed with philosophy of mind overall, and when the conversation veers toward neuroscience, I’m just bored. Philosophy of mind is too close to neuroscience, something underlined by the professor when he insisted that any discussion of free will must start with science. I love science, but science is not philosophy and I do not cede ground to it in conversations about free will.
There is detectable mental activity that indicates the outcome of the choice before the person becomes aware of making a choice. Therefore the choice cannot have been made consciously, or come from consciousness.
Science is not philosophy, but what do we say when some people argue for philosophical views which are contradicted by evidence?
At the most basic level, free will indicates: An individual, an independent "agent", initiates thoughts, sorts them and "decides" on a decisive thought and acts. But remember the starting point - An "individual", a psychosomatic apparatus, himself/herself , is a mere thought appearing in Consciousness. One thought can neither initiate nor see/chose another thought (that is, free will). Free will is a complete myth and a false notion that is claimed by an individual. Free will is a completely abstract concept void of "real" content and is non-existent.
"a mere thought appearing in Consciousness" - this is not a meaningful expression, no matter how much the likes of Sam Harris keep repeating it. Nothing "appears in consciousness" apart from in a sense which is completely trivial, and therefore from which no conclusions can be drawn.
@@TotalitarianDemocrat Here we are talking about 2 different levels and we both need to understand each other as to which of these "levels" we are referring to. 1. In a state of apparent duality where there is seeming existence of 2 distinct entities - a thought holds its relative reality in the presence of consciousness. However, at no time, is a thought anything other than consciousness in its substance - that is the only reality. 2. At the absolute plane of nondual consciousness - there is no "other" (including thoughts, feelings, percepts etc.) If we do not understand this clearly, anything we utter will appear meaningless to other person.
A little disappointed in that Robert asked that the term “free will” be defined before beginning to discuss if we have it or not, and that was never really done-just danced around. At this point, I think most conversations of free will are useless unless definitions are set down first. My definition of free will is just the ability to make choices from among the options our circumstances and environments open up to us. That seems to me free will enough that we can make choices about the directions we would like our lives to take. Which is not saying, therefore you get to where you want to go. Because as any successful and truly honest person will tell you, in addition to the hard work and striving, luck and chance also play a role-sometimes even overwhelmingly so.
How about we add something to your definition? We make a choice. And we are also able to orientate this choice on reasons.
This would also invalidate Ned Block's first objection that freedom and determinism are incompatible. For if I myself (a previous state of my body, as he says) and the reasons I have determine my action, then it is free.
@@j.p.budesheimyour will is determined by your preferences, but you can’t decide your preferences.
@@dr_shrinker The choice is not simply determined by my preferences alone, but by myself and the reasons that guide me, i.e. it is self-determined. And self-determination is just another word for freedom.
@j.p.budesheim no it's not. Everything about you is determined by your biology, past experiences, and current environmental factors. You didn't choose any of that. You were determined by those factors to do any action or lack of action.
@@dustinellerbe4125 If your statement is only determined by your past, what reason should I have to believe it?
Free will is a self-contradictory concept.
The idea is that there is a "selector" who can change his position from A to B or vice versa, for no reason and that this represents the preference of the "selector."
If the "selector" changes as a result of a factor external or internal to the "selector", it is that factor, and not the "selector", that is the cause of the change. And if the change occurs arbitrarily without being caused by any factor external or internal to the "selector", the "selector" did not "choose". The "selector" changed his position arbitrarily and without reason. It is not something that the "selector" "chose". When an atom decays, we do not consider that the atom chose to be lead.
The problem is the assumption that there is a (supernatural) entity that operates the "selector" according to its criteria. But that does not resolve the contradiction. So, the "selector" is now the soul, the problem is exactly repeated. Does the soul choose according to external or internal factors? Is it chance that dictates the criteria of the soul?
No exit.
The concept of unfree will is what interests me. Those idiosyncrasies, funny twitches. Tourettes… people with an uncontrollable urge to sing ‘the hills are alive with the sound of music. Stuff like that.
Is science not the journey of knowing the edges of complex expression yielding to a product, every time.
Humans have the ILLUSION of free will.
Ahhh, the old material of the gaps argument - do away with the phenomenon by saying its just an illusion
I don't know, maybe B.F. Skinner said this:
It's not how free your will is; it's what your will's "causal powers" are. The amount of "freedom" causal agents have is just identical to the (qualitative) size of their behavioral repertoire (i.e., the number of DIFFERENT kinds of things it can do). There has never been, objectively speaking, another definition for freedom.
One’s will is bound by ones ‘repertoire’. What determines one’s repertoires of choices? So freedom is a set of ‘causal agents’ that Skinner believes is limited. How would Skinner allow for the limitations to be set? Freedom only resides in a limited space that one resides in that can Never be broached? Conclusion is that free will can Never cross beyond the bubble of limited things it can do? Free will in a round room.
Not sure if Skinner actually said what I posted, but as I wrote it, I thought he might have liked the statements (he's no longer around to ask). Further, if he might have liked it, he might have also have said it (and maybe I was unconsciously citing him). However, my use of B.F. Skinner should be construed as a kind of "read-bait".
Waxing further. In humans, behavior "repertoire" comes from "memes", which come from our genes that allow for memes to arise (i.e., big brains, and the infrastructure of language). Memes allow phenotypic variation at a much faster pace than genotypic variation allows. The answer to the "Jeopardy question": 'the thing that sets the "repertoire" of human behavior' is actually "positive and negative reinforcement", when B.F. Skinner is playing and gets that question. However, if the "Jeopardy question" had been "the thing that sets the reinforcement value (positive or negative) for human behavior, when such behavior is UNRELATED to the "4 fs" (i.e. fleeing, fighting, feeding, and mating), then the Jeopardy answer to that question (B.F. is still playing) may well have been "what is free will?". It appears that in evolution, some amount of variations have to be tried out to see if anything interesting happens. Evolution couldn't have happened, in the super-accelerated sense that it did for humans, without that. Freedom is just the way variations can be made to happen, and (general) evolution loves variation. I think Steven J. Gould (actually) said the 2nd part of the last sentence. Maybe he said the first part too (but of that I'm unsure)?
Another thought. Block-time would seem to deny free-will. The life of the universe is a record . You are a self-aware needle. You experience the present, remember the past, can speculate on the near future and predict the immediate future. From your perspective your are creating the undulations of the grooves, equating to free will. From the records perspective, it is moving you along a pre-determined path. Both are valid in my opinion.
Would like to hear how quantum mechanical processes interact with our concept of free will
I can see the validity of both perspectives in many people's lives.
Yet if I look at the hundreds of thousands hispanic migrants moving to Anglo-Saxon North America , I cannot follow the tune of their grooves.
Breaking open their destiny could be explained by a bold move out of free will, but being unwillingly forced to join the human trafficking caravan could also be argued.
Or did they merely skip a record in the jukebox of life?
Your videos are very good Robert, very interesting to listen too.
there is no predetermined course. Using physical instruments to measure non physical things may be problematic
"Most of what we are is non physical, though, our lowest form is physical. All life on our planet has the lowest form, the Body. Our Body is an Animal and the other type of Body on our planet is a Plant. Bodies are bound absolutely to Natural Law, which is the lowest form of true Law. Natural Law is a localised form of Law and is derived from the Laws of Nature. Natural Law is the finite and specific foundational control structure ordering the actions and interactions of species, members of species, and the material sources of a planet.
The lowest non physical form of what we are is the Mind, which is a Process. There are other forms of life on our planet that have both a Body and a Mind, however, so far as we currently know, there are no Plants and only some Animals that have a Body and a Mind. The lowest forms of Mind, Instinct and Emotion, are predominantly bound to Natural Law. The next higher form of Mind is Intellect which is bound predominantly to the Laws of Nature. Intuition, the highest form of Mind, can be bound or not to both Natural Law and the Laws of Nature separately or together, or to higher forms of Law altogether. Intuition is the truest guide for our Selves.
The next non physical form of what we are is the Self, which is an Awareness. There are relatively few other forms of life on our planet that have a Self. The Self is not bound to any form of Law other than One's Own Law. It is the only form of Law that cannot be violated.
The foundation of what we are is the highest non physical form of what we are. The highest form of what we are is the Being, which is an Existence. The Being is not bound to any form of Law originating within Existence. The Being is bound absolutely to The Law.
Existence, and the Laws of Nature which are the finite and specific foundational control structure ordering the actions and interactions of all elements within Existence, cannot Be without The Law being The Law.
So, what is The Law?
In a word, The Law is options.
Definition
option: a thing that is or may be chosen.
The word 'option' does convey the idea of The Law in its most basic sense but does not clarify all of what The Law is.
Free Will does describe how our species experiences The Law but does not convey all of what The Law is.
In clarifying what The Law is;
The capitalised form of the word 'The' indicates the following noun is a specific thing.
Law is the finite and specific foundational control structure ordering the actions and interactions of all elements subordinate.
Together, the words 'The' and 'Law' (in that exact order,) is a proper noun indicating;
the singular form of Law that all other forms of Law and all other Laws are founded upon,
the singular foundation upon which Existence is founded,
the singular foundation upon which Non Existence is founded,
the singular foundation connecting Existence to Non Existence,
the concept of options, and
Free Will.
However one thinks, believes, guesses, hopes, or "knows", whether by a Big Bang, a creation story, a computer program, an expansion of consciousness, or whatever means by which Existence could have come to Be, the option for Existence to not Be also exists. Existence and Non Existence, the original options connected by the very concept of options, connected by The Law. Outside of space and before time. Extra-Existential.
As we experience The Law in our Being,
The Law is Free Will.
The First Protector of The Law is Freely Given Consent.
The First Violation of The Law is Theft of Consent."
- Goho-tekina Otoko
In a universe completely subject to Determinism, why would such a universe puppeteer us to sit around debating the existence of Free Will?
So if you claim that free will does not exist does that mean that no human being is responsible for their behavior?
No.
Yes ! No free will no rrsponsability
@@nolanr1400 So if someone murders your children, then no responsibility? No punishment? Just maybe some therapy so we can understand what caused them to murder them?
@@nolanr1400, kindly repeat that in ENGLISH, Miss.☝️
Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱
We can only be responsible for acts that are a direct and reliable consequence of our mental state. That requires determinism. If you ask someone why they made some considered, deliberate choice they will give an account in terms of their preferences, desires, fears, the information they evaluated and how they did so, etc and how those lead to their choice. That account only makes sense under a deterministic framework.
Another reason I have for thinking we don’t really have free will is that it is actually a silly self-referentially incoherent idea. If we have free will, we don’t really choose to have it. If we turn to free will itself and reflect on how we come to have it, we realize that we really have no control over having or not having it. We have no choice but to have it. In other words, free will itself is determined, which makes the idea self-referentially incoherent. It cannot be true both that we have free will and that free will is determined.
I was right with you until "free will itself is determined." Wouldn't it make more sense to say that "free will itself is a feature of the universe?" Otherwise, the natural question will be, "Who made this determination?" or "Did the particle interaction have a preference?" To determine an outcome, one must have a preferred goal in mind, otherwise it is just nature doing its thing.
@@caricue My real point is that free will is really a very confused idea.
@@lukeatmyas I've found that if you approach the subject from the idea of personal responsibility or blameworthiness, then you end up confused, but only because the premise is flawed. If you wonder whether it is physically impossible to do anything but the one thing that you end up doing, then it isn't confusing at all. We don't live in a deterministic universe, so the parts do not control the whole and the past does not control the present, which means that your choice is a part of the functioning of the universe, and since you are doing what you want, it's reasonable to call it free will.
Trying to find Ultimate Responsibility is also incoherent because we don't have an Ultimate Judge. We only have a physical world that features reliable causation which allows for life to do things that are not controlled by particle interactions. In fact, nothing is controlled by particle interactions since particles are passive objects that don't control anything. Sorry Sabine.
Why is he talking about coercion by violence (a gun to one's head)? That has nothing to do with free will, philosophically. It simply imposes an imminent choice between obeying the gun wielder or disobeying.
Free will is the ability to resist donating to scumbags
The question has one answer and that is, Yes and no.
It is a question designed to open up an unlimited potential of interviews.
It is therefore designed for its entertainment value and has nothing to do with "truth".
could a sense of free will come from having time and energy in the brain to do something? indeterminism in quantum waves / fields has time / energy uncertainty that might produce sense of free will? maybe part of the "unconscious" element prior to "conscious" action in brain?
I think It's just a matter of how in control we feel, and how our choice reflects our relative desires. It's just how those desires are ballanced.
There are basically four scenarios relating to our sense of free will. One is when we face a choice and know immediately what choice we want to make, perhaps due to a previous commitment or because we have a preconceived preference. If at all possible I will choose to make myself a cup of tea in the morning. It's still a free choice, I'm not being forced to do it, but I will do it if I can. The other category is where I have a choice and I am uncertain what i will choose until I do so. I need to go through a process of consideration and evaluation first, and until I've done that I don't know the outcome. For example when deciding on my move in a strategy game where I'm not sure what the best move is. Thirdly there's the case where my range of choice is constrained. Will I go to work on Tuesday? It's possible that I won't, but it's largely not a decision that's in my power to just decide by myself. I'm under an obligation, but it was a freely chosen obligation. Finally there's the case where I genuinely don't have much in the way of a choice at all. If I were arrested for some crime for example, some might try to resist arrest and they have that choice, but it's really not much of a choice.
The brain takes in information and makes calculations that result in actions and we are aware of them.
The foundation of human thought:
There are three types of truth: that which we believe to be true, that which we know to be true, and that which we think to be true. These are the three realms of thought: religion, science and philosophy.
Do not expect to understand everything unless you approach gaining knowledge as a philosopher.
The thought is either right or wrong. The action is either good or evil. It is evil to advance the self by exploiting others. There are only two general choices: dominate or cooperate. One leads to destruction. The other leads to a better life for all. Rather than trying to dominate, we must all work together to insure justice for all people. Do no harm except in self defense. Protect all from harm where possible.
About Philosophy:
Philosophy is the process for discovering true knowledge. Philosophy is the collection of true knowledge.
The objective of philosophy is to determine what is right, not who is right.
The goal of a philosophical discussion should be to reach agreement. An assertion should be found to be: true, not true, or unknown.
The purpose of philosophy is to establish a rational world view to be used for making decisions.
Do not expect to understand everything unless you approach gaining knowledge as a philosopher.
The most significant contribution to humankind of Philosophy is the realization that what holds a person back from finding truth is their own false beliefs. We need to validate our basic assumptions from time to time.
Assumption Based Philosophy:
A practical philosophy which supports humans making well informed decisions must be assumption based. Many philosophical assertions resolve to unknown. It is difficult to make decisions if there is no knowledge about which path to take when coming to a decision point. If we restrict our philosophy to the real world, we can build a knowledge based on a foundation of a limited set of assumptions. A practical philosophy is bounded by the unknown. We can make decisions while inside of this boundary; but, have no reliable knowledge outside of the boundary.
Premise: The key assumption: The world we are meant to understand is delivered by our senses.
Free Will simply means that the human individual is under no external control of the ability to make choices. The individual has total control over the processing of the reaction to external stimulation.
There are two choices: either individuals have free will and are therefore responsible for their actions or every action is predetermined. The world would be a very dull place if every action of every living creature were predetermined. Therefore, we can just assume that all living things react to conditions in the environment and have control over the reaction to change in the environment. Thus, humans have free will and need to use intelligence to make the best decisions in their own best interest.
When did I get to choose free will?
You have choice without control of what to choose from or if that choice effects what happens at all ..
Will is control of what is
And
Choice is an assertion of what you would prefer having questionable impact on the result
How is it that so many people are so keen not to be free?
The better people can see the connections, reasons and backgrounds the more we have challenges to keep the sense of responsibility alert. They are two different dimensions.
So, its unfree will not free will
To paraphrase Alex O'Connor: You only do things for two reasons. You want to... or you're forced to. Force is not freedom and you can't choose what you want. You just do. You can't choose to prefer ice cream to broccoli. You discover it.
@@lrvogt1257 Don't know,will think about it
Probability, not incompatible with anything, freewill is just the ability to {recognize/ or not} choices. at small enough scales determinism fails, this feeds a probabilistic result to larger scales, it's when we recognize that it takes a preponderance of events to be causal, that we see there is no real mystery to having a choice. Freewill is only an illusion when it is attached to religious reasoning, attached to probability the mystery disappears.
Determinism fails? How? When?
At small scales either your condition made from previous causes decides or you decide to make a random decision for the same reason.
There is no example or explanation here of anything but determinism. Would love to hear one.
@@ihatespam2 According to quantum mechanics, the behavior of particles at the subatomic level is probabilistic rather than deterministic, at it's root the universe is probabilistic not deterministic. This is why when you flip a coin 100 times you don't get 50h/50t every time. You can run any question related to this on physics stack exchange, I'm sure there is someone with the patience to explain it.
The quantum probability doesn’t not occur at our scale and is averaged out, that’s why it doesn’t matter.@@brianstevens3858
@@brianstevens3858quantum mechanics is not indeterministic, and even if it was, you don't control how your quarks move... Absolutely nothing to do with free will
@@Cal96729 a. Quantum mechanics has a deterministic Schrödinger equation for the wave function. The Göttingen-Copenhagen statistical interpretation is based on the Born Rule that interprets the wave function as a “probability amplitude.” A precept of this interpretation is the lack of determinism in quantum mechanics. b, the choices a person makes is entirely dependent on the choice available, thus dependent on natural laws, the point being the ability to choose a supernatural explanation is an illusion, since the supernatural does not in fact come into play at any scale whatsoever. Now do you see what the point was?
determinism as states being ordered as functions of the other time slices and so on is a slightly broader version of determinism than that, basically any set of states in order has such a function no matter how strange it is, so even in-determinism can't escape that definition if the outcomes are specific in any sense, now no possible definition of indeterminism can or has gone past that, either you split the world into a tree of outcomes or you say random thing happen not a function of the previous state in the same way it is in newtonian physics for example, but in either case you have a spesific state before and after any moment, and so we are stuck with only being able to come up with weakly deterministic hypotheticals, the notion of indeterminism can't even in principle escape this kind of weak determinism, and so it is garuanteed to be the same kind of problem for both kinds of lack of free will.
Block is spot on, libertarian free will is incoherent, because what we will is determined by our genetics and the environment acting on us. In the same way a mountain is the result of the forces that molded it, along with the weather and erosion it is subject to… There is no problem of free will. IOW “you can do what you will, but you can’t will what you will” (Schopenhauer)
Freewill as in the finite capacity to wonder the mind in having a satisfied gut?
Or in living out animal desires free of relation?
The mind has only a finite capacity upon being fueled by lesser expressions contained with in the gut
The civilization state is as a gut containing lesser expressions moving up the food chain towards the emperor
Might it be that free will is so pervasive, so everywhere and that we are so immersed in it, that we don't see it? The relationship between choice, association (Peirce), desire and need. The 'knowing how to be' that must necessarily confront every agent, right down to the subatomic. Something to contemplate in the new year.
Yes, yes! I never even thought to be that ecstatic about it, but I agree. Free will is all....
The universe is random and chaotic, so that it keeps generating information. Hence we should abandon the medieval and mechanistic either/or approaches when trying to understand things. There are tendencies which lead to unpredictable events which later on feed our brain which in turn generate random epigenetic consequences (like the albino babies in Africa being born immune to malaria, but being considered evil by the culture and so on).
Free will? No.
Freed will? Yes. It’s an aftersensation.
You don't have free will unless you bend the definition to mean something different than what it's generally agreed upon. To have been able to have made a different choice than you did, at any given moment. Lots of hopium and copium going an around this topic, and it's funny to me to think that the misunderstanding of it all is determined or random too 😆
Still open to potential evidence or logic that overturns this for me but not looking likely..
There's also a paradox that I feel more free somehow knowing there's no real freedom
Bizarre world we're in alright. Have a good new year!
Free Will?
Confronted to a moral dilema you can always choose.
A different story is that not the 2 elections have equal consequences, introducing pressure in the election: Convenient or just ?
mental processes are in part fractal at the neuronal level so it isn't that we "choose" to do something it is that neural activity tends towards an action but it's not "free" in that sense since it is subject to the underlying baseline of neural activity...a bit like in quantum mechanics there's an underlying probability function...just my own view
Is there wilpower?
In many near death experiences people describe observing their body and not recognizing it as their own body. They are able to make choices like moving their awareness to a hospital waiting room to observe their loved ones while their body is in the surgical operating room. Many NDE’s also describe desperately wanting to stay in Heaven with Jesus but Jesus sends them back into their bodies.
Super excellent discussion. Wondering if more time can be spent on discussing the consequences of Free Will not existing; however, did enjoy the edge of presentation possibility as to whether the universe itself has free will at all. If “absolute determinism” is a force, does the past, present, or future even exist? If it is the case that the past was never there as it was seen, how are thoughts affected by determinism? I hope this interview comes around again with more information. Probably, I will never look at mathematical randomness quite the same way again.
What if determinism isn't a coherent idea? Do the parts control the whole? Does the small control the large? Does the past control the present? Do particle interactions control the macro world? I think the answer to all of these is no, so what is being determined and who is doing the determining?
The world we live in right now, rich or poor, is the most fertile, rich environment to test your body with your mind
how does choice determine brain processes?
The answer is no
In principle, indeterminism is compatible with free will. Indeterminism does not necessarily mean that we do something by chance. It only means that we do not know how the event happens. Many proponents of free will rely on this, as well as relying on intuition.
Free will requires the ability to do things (including produce thoughts), other than we do them, in the circumstances we do them. Redefining free will because we do not like there being no free will is a cop out and would be misleading. Free will requires having the ability to determine the outcome of at least some events that are otherwise indeterminant (hence the notion of magic or someone else inside that some speak of).
As something distinct from the rest of the environment we make our own decisions. However, those decisions are influenced by the totality of the environment, including our physical selves. It happens that the ever-increasing objective evidence is against the proponents of free will who rely entirely on intuition and just don’t like the feeling of not having free will.
Interview with Sapolsky?
no thanks, the most overrated guy on the planet
Why? are his views not well known already?
The short answer in NO
energy in quantum waves at faster than speed of light are at least indeterminist, not determined; any consciousness in quantum waves / fields would not be deterministic?
I don't control what happens to me
free will is just an a priori nonsensical concept
Explain your reasoning
I could say The same, No free will is an a priori nonsensical concept, it goes Against fundamental human perception..
yep
@@rekhagujarathi105
We're deterministic machines but can behave indeterministically by using random input sources when making our decisions. When we act against what our brains suggests as a result of such randomness we get the illusion of free will. We only act against our training when the cost of doing so is not that great. We behave indeterministically only to experience.
I think the people are logical, and they will do what seems logical to do and what they believe is in their best interest. But they can choose to not do something if they don't feel like doing it. No one lives as though they believe that they aren't free. I just don't believe anyone who sits in front of a camera as an learned man or woman and says that we don't have free will actually believes that they aren't free to just do what they want to do at any given moments notice. If they do, then they aren't human and they are agents of the matrix, and NPCs. I'm will to concede that there may be are percentage of people on this planet that are NPCs and aren't there own person but represent the background energy of the planet. But there is no way in hell that I believe that people live as though they believe that they aren't free. It's Godeols Incompleteness theorem. There will always be things that are true that can't be proven why they are true. Free will is one of those things. Deep down inside we all know that we make choices ... those of us who are actually human.
*Second Attempt:* Humans have the free will to *personally select* from a series of options. That is the extent of our free will. Particles and other inanimate "stuff" have no other option than to do whatever it is that they do. That's the difference and why we have free will. ... Those who claim that we don't - or say, _"You can't choose your preferences!"_ ... or ... _"You can't choose to choose what you choose to choose!"_ are merely succumbing to semantic obfuscation.
I am surprised at how many people continue to waste everyone's time claiming there's some "deterministic demon" hiding behind the curtain creating the "illusion" of free will.
As "The Wizard of Oz" taught us, ... *_"Pay no attention to the deterministic demon behind the curtain!_*
Apparently, the word "buffoonery" will prevent your comment from showing up.
All options presented are tethered to their prior causes and the one you ‘choose’ will not be due to a free willed choice. It was the one you were going to choose based on prior causes. Period. There is no wiggling out of physics.
@@ajohnson929 *"All options presented are tethered to their prior causes and the one you ‘choose’ will not be due to a free willed choice."*
... The only way you can make a decision is to first be presented with options. Arguing that our decisions are "tethered" to whatever generates the options is nothing more than needless obfuscation.
*" It was the one you were going to choose based on prior causes. Period."*
... I am presented with a choice between vanilla or chocolate. Although I _could_ choose vanilla or neither, I choose chocolate. ... End of story. To claim otherwise is pure nonsense.
Claiming that I had no other option than to choose chocolate is believing in the _"deterministic demon hiding behind the curtain."_ You are presenting the typical unfalsifiable talking points that come from the many faithful believers of the "Church of Hard Determinism."
@@ajohnson929 Living matter wiggled out of non living matter. And with that, wiggled out of being fully bound to the deterministic world they emerged out of. What precludes something emerging within a deterministic system that is no longer completely causally bound to that system? but rather is now capable of choosing from different options and possibilities the environment opens up to it? Especially, in light of having the ability to make such choices, seeming to be so clearly beneficial for adaptation and survival in that environment?
>"I am surprised at how many people continue to waste everyone's time claiming there's some "deterministic demon" hiding behind the curtain creating the "illusion" of free will.
I have not seen anyone here ever claim this, or anything like it.
People who deny that we have free will are kidding themselves. They invent definitions that show that they are themselves muddle headed.
Do you choose something with reason or without reason?
If you choose something for a certain reason, that was the cause of your choice. But if you decide to change the decision that seemed most reasonable to you for a different one, then the latter is the one that seems most reasonable to you. You could choose things that harm you, but if you decide that, that is the choice that seems most reasonable to you.
You may think that you are capable of choosing something at random but that is an illusion. When you choose at random, your brain tends toward one of the options for reasons that are beyond your awareness but were still a factor in the decision.
On the other hand, assuming that one capriciously chooses among options cannot be called an exercise of will. Random actions are not something guided by will.
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd Thank you for your thought. I differ. I think that it can be called an exercise of free will to choose capriciously. I think that most choices are capricious in a relevant sense. Nearly every decision that I have made in my life has been stupid and irrational, you might say capricious. I think that doesn't mean that my decisions were unfree; I just think that I was stupid and irrational. Philosophers who think that a free decision cannot be capricious are, in a sense, dominated by their own rationality; that's why they became philosophers. I think that, because of their personalities, they are defining free will as necessarily impossible, rather than defining it in a way that might be possible. I see it as futile, or hyper-rationalistic, to define free will out of possible existence.
@@christophergame7977 There is a difference between "choose" and "change status." They are not the same and changing state cannot be called an exercise of will unless we distort the meaning of human will.
Changing state arbitrarily requires an arbitrary factor and this in turn requires another, ad infinitum.
An arbitrary decision does not solve the problem.
@@EduardoRodriguez-du2vd Thank you for your thoughts. It comes to a definition of free will. For me, the question is 'what is the willer free from?' For me, the willer is free when no one is compelling him. For you, that question hardly matters, I guess. For you, freedom is a kind of impersonal or intrapersonal metaphysical category, I guess? For me, it's a difference between compulsion and non-compulsion by someone else, a matter of interpersonal relations. For you, I guess, it's a matter purely within the willer?
@@christophergame7977 For me and for almost everyone, free will is the exercise of human will without any type of conditioning.
For me, in this context, freedom is that given two equally possible choices, the chooser is not obliged to choose one in particular. You are FREE to choose either of the two in equal measure.
I agree with you that someone forcing you to make a certain choice prevents the exercise of your free will (if this had been possible).
But to me, any factor that unbalances one's ability to choose between the two options, in equal measure, prevents one from using their free will. And all people are affected by factors that prevent them from choosing between options to the same extent. Choosing is the result of factors.
Concise and compelling view. Free will seems obviously to exist and yet physics and neuroscience tells us that it obviously does not exist. It does seem that science and common sense are talking about different things, and Block's "diminished" view of free will bridges the gap convincingly
Physics and neuroscience tells us what exactly? Does it tell us that macro structures like brains don't actually do anything since all the decisions are made at the level of particle interactions? Or does it tell us that nature spent huge effort and resources to make brains specifically so that they could generate behaviors that we anticipate will move us toward specified goals?
Depends on who you ask, I guess! Neuroscience generally claims that consciousness and decision making arise from the brain, so that ultimately neurons and the connections between them determine what we do. Physics just takes it one step further with the idea that everything in the brain can be described with precision by the laws of quantum theory. In other words, whatever we do is governed by what the particles in our brain are going to do: we can never compel the particles that make up our brains to do something that goes against these laws. But in my view, although the argument is solid, it is not very satisfying and seems to miss the point. I like your second possibility… @@caricue
@@caricueyou're just describing the same thing at different levels of abstraction. No incompatibility there. And nature is not teleological, it doesn't have a "goal". You're a cosmic accident. That's it.
what and where is a mind? no one knows.
If you define indeterminism as chance, then consciousness is neither deterministic nor indeterministic. Consciousness works with an informed decision making process for which we are held accountable. Again biblically, consciousness is not the same as soul. It is true, of course, that there can be no absolute freewill.
And that eliminates the soul completely. It eliminates any responsibility on our part to a higher being.
@@ajohnson929 What do you understand to be the soul?
First of all... any human's birth was not decided by him/her/them, as in which country, gender family, economic and social strata, race, sexual orientation, level of freedom , he or she or they ll be born with..!!! So, how can u even talk about free will...? Could those of whom, who have excelled in their lives coz of the progress that they made, really do so if they were not born at a particular place at a particular time... ??? So, where's the free will...? Would u be making these videos if the universe didn't conspire it??? And if u refuse to make any more videos, would it be you, or would it be the universe again propelling u to take such a decision...?? There's nothing like free will...Period. Even ur decisions are not truely yours... coz they propel ur life towards a pre-determined outcome!!!
A question that can never really be answered.
Sure we can answer. We don’t have free will according to all science. Do you have anything that can support the alternative answer?
even in void our thoughts will be "influenced" by being in void. There is no total free will, even the actions of God would be "influenced" by what he created. Maybe the initial thought that could have created reality was totally free, if ever existed. But also there is some free will actions, because morality depends on it. And the most important thing in the reality cant be an illusion. That would require a too precise deterministic rollback to the initial conditions.
🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM:
Just as the autonomous beating of one's heart is governed by one's genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and environmental conditioning.
This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the author of our thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few persons extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will.
Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if one, for example, is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally-desirable as the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart!
So, in both of the aforementioned examples, there is a pre-existing preference (at a given point in time) for one particular dish or pet. Even if a person liked cats and dogs EQUALLY, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice isn’t made freely, but entirely based upon the person’s genetic code plus the individual's up-to-date conditioning. True equality is non-existent in the phenomenal sphere.
The most common argument against determinism is that humans (unlike other animals) have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which one to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”.
Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a dream in the “mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how an action performed in the present is the result of a chain of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity).
At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect. The genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception.
University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent phenomenon, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings.
If any particular volitional act was not caused by the preceding thoughts and actions, then the only alternative explanation would be due to RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists claim that subatomic particles can randomly move in space, but true randomness cannot occur in a deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that two motor vehicles colliding together was the result of pure chance (therefore the term “accident”), quantum physicists are unable to see that the seeming randomness of quantum particles are, in fact, somehow determined by each and every preceding action which led-up to the act in question. It is a known scientific fact that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software program is able to make the decision to generate a number at “random”.
We did not choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, and most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic code) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle).
Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being. If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds.
The IMPRESSION that we have free-will can be considered a “Gift of Life” or “God’s Grace”, otherwise, we may be resentful of our lack of free-will, since, unlike other creatures, we humans have the intelligence to comprehend our own existence. Even an enlightened sage, who has fully realized that he is not the author of his thoughts and actions, is not conscious of his lack of volition at every moment of his day. At best, he may recall his lack of freedom during those times where suffering (as opposed to mere pain) begins to creep-in to the mind or intellect. Many, if not most scientists, particularly academic philosophers and physicists, accept determinism to be the most logical and reasonable alternative to free-will, but it seems, at least anecdotally, that they rarely (if ever) live their lives conscious of the fact that their daily actions are fated.
Cont...
@@JagadguruSvamiVegananda next time make your free will choice to not copy and paste as a reply. i know that it's classic for those pseudo-wise people to sit on a pillow and mortally annoying the adoring crowd with verbose nonsense but here we are two and politely you should discuss with me, not copy and paste. You surely think that this reply was written in the initial conditions of the universe so accept it ...
@@francesco5581, kindly repeat that in ENGLISH, Miss.☝️
Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱
How would you prove scientifically that will can be modelled using only randomness, determinisism ( or a mix of the two) ? Isn't it an argument from ignorance or lack of imagination? It seems to be rooted in presumptions from an overly self confident scientistic worldview.
Unless, perhaps, consciousness isn't bound by time. It already spends a lot of its energy in the past, and a little in the present... if it somehow was able to exist in the future, we would have answers to things like the apparent pre-loading of our choices.
👍🏻 Not because I agree with you. But I must take time to think about your statement.
In life nothing is one way. I’ve always said life is like a mosaic. Who and how we think today from politics to our beliefs on afterlife, God or life in the cosmos changes. With free will or not that too is a mosaic. There is free will but it’s like a music sheet that works in tandem with determinism. Our make up on how we think is layered, ancestrial collective conscious that’s inherited, cultural identity, gender, personal experiences, environment all work in tandem to influence the outcome but there is a small space remaining for free will. The space between stimulus and response. Victor Frankl.
All you said was everything is determined, but still free will. Did I miss the part where there was something showing free will?
The free will is subjective feeling. It is religious invention. It is invented to wash away the problem of eternal punishment in religion: it is easier to blame and scare people ”in the name of God” if the decision of belief would be based on free will.
Free will is a subjective feeling, but it is not a religious invention. Ihe idea has often been misused by religion for its own purposes.
We make decisions and we are aware that we do so. There is not prima facie reason to question that the decisions are made freely, and generally we do not often do so. When we question it, the objective evidence mounts against us having free will. It is hard to let go.
Because we can't predict what comes next it appears we have free will.
Everyone I've ever seen on this show was clueless. Questions like this are unanswerable from a physicalist perspective. A semantic theory is necessary, but almost no one today even knows what that is.
- TH-cam, Sabine Hossenfelder, You don’t have free will but don’t worry.
- TH-cam, Cosmic Skeptic, Why free will doesn’t exist.
- TH-cam, The University of Chicago, Do we really have free will? with Robert Sapolsky
"It is stranger than we can think" RBS Haldane.
OH NO! He wants to use SCIENCE to determine understandings! Kinda blows this channel out.
To paraphrase what I remember from B.F. Skinner long ago, Lacking Free Will does not mean we should not try to swim back to the boat when we fall over.
Another conversation with an atheist denying the obvious. Yawn…
Most have free will to do whatever they want, but most people don’t do constructive things.
These free will conversations are just a bunch of intellectual masturbation.
I'm not a robot. I can look at my options, and decide what to choose. I can also choose my life path and aim for it. We are all subject to influences, and we are all somewhat shaped in various ways through life and our experiences. I always have the option to choose, or not choose at all.
Free will used to be thought of as the ability to freely choose from your options, and now it has all these nuances and new think bullshxt added onto it.
According to the highest form of free will, it is literally impossible to exist no matter what framework it's under. Not even a god that's not limited to it's nature of love or honesty could have free will, because there is some form of contradiction it cannot over come, or a road it cannot come back from, like overcoming a permanent self deletion.
But to bring everyone back to earth with both feet on the ground, I had the ability to choose to leave a comment or not. My ego influenced me, which it doesn't always have power over me. I can control it, but I chose not too. People have options and choices to make. There is no one forcing my hand against my desire every second of the day.
This debate is so dumb.
I often point out the uselessness of debating free will since no matter what you believe, you will still live your life as if you have free will. As Phillip K Dick said so eloquently, "Reality is that which, once you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
@@caricue That's a good point actually.
My bladder has free will
Eternity allowed for the potential of a universe which had the potential for intelligent, self-aware life to develop. Life without free will is a gross joke. There are at any moment an infinite number of factors that impress themselves on existence, including us. Understanding the meaning of the mechanism does not explain the output. Free-will? Certainly. It is what Eternity intended.
Thinking that we actually deserve all the suffering in the world is a cruel joke. Free will is the illusion of choice. We only do what we want but we can't choose what we want. Things happen and we discover what we want.
Ned commits the same basic mistake so many do: he thinks determined and random are true dichotomy. They aren't. All of his analysis and arguments are a house of cards from this error.
Randomness gets you know where near freewill.
@ajohnson929 who is saying randomness gets us freewill?
We have evidence for deterministic cause and effect, and we have evidence for random causation. Do you have any evidence for causation that is neither?
@@simonhibbs887 what do you consider "evidence"? If the only thing you consider "evidence" is physical things in a causal deterministic framework then you're simply begging the question.
@@robertsaget9697 I think the false dichotomy you’re attributing to Block is imprecise, but I do agree that this is such an important point. Block initially presents a perfectly reasonable dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism, but then overreaches when he moves to what each pole of that dichotomy entails. Whilst determinism does entail fixed/predictable outcomes, indeterminism does not automatically entail randomness, which I believe is your point. If the universe contains intelligent agents that have the power to influence events (which is a loose definition of what we tend to label ‘free will’), then an indeterministic universe could have direction imposed on it by those agents. In other words, indeterminism only entails randomness in a universe with no intelligent, influencing agents (i.e. a universe of only mindless matter and void), which is the very issue being discussed. His move from indeterminism to randomness presupposes an absence of free will, and so cannot be used to argue against it.
Free Will is absolutely fundamental in our consciousness and in the universe. We use it in every choice we make. Quantum probabilities in your brain make determinism impossible. Free will decisions that you make, are made in an infinite number of ways, but they all come down to just two things, logic and emotion, with an infinite number of ways that they are weighted and combined to reach a decision.
Think of emotion as being more of an animalistic drive for what you want, and logic as being what you determine to be the best choice for you, either morally or physically. There are an infinite number of combinations that will lead you to a decision. The idea that you could predict that or that it could be predetermined is ridiculous!
Some will be beneficial for you and some will not. If you tend to give in to emotion, it makes you much more likely to develop addictions to what gives you pleasure or makes you feel good. On the other hand, always following logic makes you more methodical and less animalistic.
Both are needed in infinitely varying degrees to make you wholly human, but the more you understand them, the easier it is to recognize attempts at manipulation, and avoid having your consent modified and manufactured by it, in different forms of advertising and persuasion thrust upon you by others and by media.
Free will does not explain why we want what we want. We just do. Things happen and we realize we want something and that is what we do. To suggest otherwise is to suggest we do things for no reason at all but we do everything for a reason and each reason has a cause and every cause has a cause. Every moment is a direct result of the previous moment.
@@lrvogt1257 That assumption is just not true. The reason you are wrong about this is because the brain is not perfect, ever, and it doesn't control you body perfectly either. It is all based on averages and quantum probabilities that are NOT determined, ever, before an action happens, and then there is the response to the unexpected result! Are we conditioned to want and like things? Sure we are, but you have the free will and ability to change that.
@@michaelbartlett6864 : The brain is far from perfect but it does control your actions even if some functions are automatic or dysfunctional. That has nothing to do with will.
Quantum physics is deterministic and random events have nothing to do with will. They may have unknown origins but they affect the world deterministically.
You can't will yourself to want what you don't want for no reason at all but you can want something else more and that is what you'll act on.
@@lrvogt1257 Do you really believe that everything since the dawn of the universe, including your own conception and all the events that led to your becoming sentient, were all predetermined and that exactly what is going to happen in the forever future is already determined? Think about that - the single snowflake, which doesn't exist yet, is predetermined by its weight to cause a roof to collapse or a branch of a tree to break. That is what you're saying!
@@lrvogt1257 No, quantum physics is probabilistic, not deterministic, and therein lies the problem with that idea.
Humans definitely have Free Willy. Parts 1, 2, and 3.
Ned should go on the road with his comedy act.
We don’t have freewill. None. Zero. You can’t weasel out of reality
@@ajohnson929 --- Thank you for your purposeless meaningless inconsequential comment that was determined less than a second after “the Big Bang”.
@@JohnQPublic11Thank YOU for your purposeless, meaningless, inconsequential comment.
So far you’ve done and said nothing and then mocked everyone for questing it.
You mocked Ned to start with, now back it up. Say something intelligent to disprove the idea of no free will.
Its hilarious how unconscious godless mindless purposeless inconsequential determinist meatsticks delusionally imagines itself a sentient human by pretending to presuppose and adopt the worldview of sentient intellectually self-aware humans with the GOD-given gift of libertarian free-will so as to then fantasize about engaging in argumentation around subjects it doesn’t even believe its capable of believing in!
what if it really doesn't matter either way - god does play dice but you can't see the results
What god? The results can’t be seen because it is far too complicated to predict most of it.
I hope we find answers about Consciousness in the new year Robert 🎉❤
"You" aren't a disembodied deciding machine. The guest makes an exception for people with brain damage, but that's absurd. Your brain isn't an appliance that " you" use. YOU ARE your kidneys and thumbs and skin and brains - in whatever condition they're in. Your thoughts and awareness and will are only a miniscule part of the thing you are.
I think more than half of the "problem" of free will is a misunderstanding of what a person is in the first place.
You're more like a large city than like an individual, detached, rational agent. Do cities have "free will?"
I don't think cities have will of any sort. Maybe they do, but I have never thought about it before.
The ability to determine future events is only possible by physicality. Only physical process can determine other physical processes. To decide to eat one flavor over the other is a physical process, because eating vanilla is a future, physical process.
Moreover, from a different tact....all choices are either determined or random choice, neither entails freedom of will. The definition of freewill is the notion of making unimpeded choices. EX. If a blind person isn't able to decide color preferences because of an inability to see color, their choice is impeded.
@@dr_shrinker The physics that describes why someone chooses burger king instead of taco bell are a lot harder to explain than the imagination-world causes, which might be that they're going to a job interview and they associate taco bell with flatulence. "Job interview" is not exactly a fundamental particle.
All that mental activity is a physical process, but it's also an information-al process, and information follows different rules.
Is it only true that a chicken crosses the road because of some neuron that fired? Is it not also true (or even more true?) that it crossed to get to the other side?
So I think there may be room for some kind of top-down compatiblism.
@@bozo5632 I disagree. Information doesn’t follow different rules. Information does not do anything. It’s passive, not active. Red, hot, and 8 do nothing. I’m being literal here, but I’m still correct. Information is a reflection (or label) we use to define physical processes and as such, it is the processes that make the rules.
2 by itself is nothing but a bunch of pixels on my iPad. -- but if I use two to count the number of apples, the “two” becomes a label. If I have two more apples, we label it as four. The information is not following a different rule than physics, it describes physics. Information cannot deviate from physics, only our misperception of it can. - again, showing our will is impeded.
My point is, physical processes can only determine future events, in ALL facets. The reasons one likes taco bell over BK might be hard to explain, physically, but they can be explained physically….even if just in principle.
@@dr_shrinker I don't dispute the physicality part of it. Information has no separate existence on its own - it must be encoded in the physical world. (Some people would disagree, but I'm sure they're mistaken.)
But information does follow different rules. A logical proposition is a logic equation, not a physics equation. Physics/nature doesn't add or subtract or take averages, but we do. It's a different sort of thing, governed by different rules.
I don't know if that really makes space for (some version of) free will or not, but I think it might.
@@bozo5632 I don’t believe in freewill. Will is determined by ‘prior” events. But I don’t know about the rest of your post. You might be right.
I have enough free will at the moment to say:
HAPPY 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣ TO EVERYONE. 🎉🥂🍾🍀🎇
That's been in the pipeline for at least 13.8 billion years.
Free will implies there was a first cause, which is about as ludicrous as the opposite.
Have fun with this paradox. I'm making pizza
I'll answer that question. I clicked on this video just to answer the question even though I was curious about the content. Yes, we have freewill and I proved it by clicking off right after typing my comment even though I wanted to hear what was said.
Obviously some in academia have been confused by this to the point they don't want to categorize & properly label what they mean.
This a great task for a new generation and paradigm to work on.
The entire system on a macro scale has a deterministic out come even though it can never define where any qauntative micro will be at any given point.
Under the chaldean model and cosmogony your absolved by humanist expression. This means if you grant newtonian deterministic simplicity to the big bang evolutionary higherachy then it pushes the infinite sums of approximating complexity down upon you and me. This is what we've temporarily done under 1900s structuralism.
We treat anti realism as realism the way naturalist , prescription of absolute space ,with absolute horizontal time even though this is not what Einstein or newton is saying.
We definitely are a human dashboard, a triality of self that is navagating that dualistic model but we can re allocate deterministic values where we choose. We can push the infinite sums of approximating complexity out into infinite space and universe with prescriptions or non deterministic quantitative outcomes.
We've proven this throughout history with many different notions of time , granted many different prescriptions rationalizing the world around us with many different interpretations
Chaldean mindset is the wrong one to use on the mind. The basian model may map this line of thought but it doesn't map all neural architecture.
We can simply plagiarize Jesus salvational unification of the tripartite nature of man, or hibber space math and lay it over the brain to unify the classical and qauntom physics but ,again this is plagiarizing lol
Its definitely a free will individual but I would agree many aren't, they're just acting out no different than computation would.
We always have the comforting thought, we are free to commit suicide. I question was it just better not to know any of this, someone evil will only use it against your pursuit of happiness.
Remaining deluded is never better. The “free to commit suicide” comment exhibits the misunderstanding of free which keeps the illusion alive in most minds. Free doesn’t mean, no one will stop you, or the external world doesn’t present any obstacles. It means your internal decision making can’t be free from everything that came before creating the conditions in which your decisions are made.
Try this, you are free to pick a religion, right? So, right now, pick a religion you do not believe and start believing in it.
Not just on the surface, genuinely be convinced. You can’t do it.
you are not free, but compelled to do it, in case you ever do it
@@ihatespam2I could pick a religion of the line of Abraham, getting from one to two and then three. I would guess there is a logical line to follow but I have already eaten from the tree of knowledge and found myself naked and self aware. Maybe a western form of Buddhism were the beliefs fit with my lifestyle, how ever sinful it maybe.
Something pagan with runic symbolism believing that sort of thing could take your eye out. A modern religion based on selfishness, gender and environment is it called wokeism or just post-modern, well there is as many isms as genders in this one.
It was not lost on me I was just being flippant. As some far smarter that I once said”it’s not understanding why people suffer psychosis, it’s understanding why more people don’t suffer from it” I guess for every action there is a reaction. I believe ignorance is bliss and sometimes it is better not to know.
@@truefact844 not sure what this is a response to, but wow, almost everything you said is problematic.
I would love to know what sin you think I am guilty of and what you think a sin is?
@@ihatespam2you asked me to pick a religion I don’t believe in and try to believe it. I was trying to say maybe not in the most elegant way, which religion? If I was to believe something that I could frame in a way that it was the perfect fit, like the western version of Buddhism which seems to mean do a little yoga, treat everyone with respect but I guess it’s more of a philosophy.
If what you were asking was not possible as you’re trying to suggest, we would not have any cults.
I was not in any way saying you are sinful and I am truly sorry if that was the way what I wrote made you feel. As to sin, what do you believe it is, then I maybe able to explain why you felt I was suggesting you somehow had managed to fall into it?
If I was looking to you suggest what you mean by religion and G.O.D. Why would that be problematic?
We could say that Jung’s father questioning his faith in G.O.D. and at the end of his life, feeling that he had completely lost his faith. Jung’s life’s work was to know enough about the psychological makeup of humanity, only to prove to himself that his father’s life was not wasted on a false belief. Jung when asked if he believes in G.O.D. Said believe,I know. Would it not be reductive to say all that work was just for one question, no matter how broad that question was?
Anything free is worth the price you pay for it...
I can answer this very easily, Humans don't have free will, because humans don't actually exist. I know, you don't believe me, it sounds ridiculous to you, but I assure you there are no humans, no people. There is nothing here but Consciousness doing it's dance. That is what you are, Consciousness, or call it Awareness, or Life, whatever you prefer, but anything that exists in a perceived physical realm is merely Consciousness expressing itself as an object including humans. The outside world and all in it are made up of the same stuff as the believable world you create each night in your own dreams. It's all you and only you, and you are Consciousness.
Every time someone is thinking he maybe uses it lol
Free will is simply a social term, it is the ability for a person to make choices without other people’s unwanted interference. It has nothing to do with philosophy or biology etc. It is merely a concept for people to help distinguish individuals behavior from a group. If you go to court the judge isn’t going to factor in determinism.
Your soul and free will arises from the quantum wave from which the particle like nature of you body arises. The whole universe arises from the quantum wave which is the source of all.
Please provide evidence of a soul or don't introduce it into the conversation
@@markb3786
Let's start slow.
Your body was assembled by vibrating, self assembling microtubules, messing around with your parent's DNA.
m.th-cam.com/video/N97cgUqV0Cg/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/X_tYrnv_o6A/w-d-xo.html
@@markb3786 Microtubule Intelligence in Slime Mold (Without Brains)
th-cam.com/video/nPOQQp8CCls/w-d-xo.html
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4594612/
m.th-cam.com/video/mOI-JlNcDVs/w-d-xo.html
@@markb3786 Experiments have shown that memories are not stored only in the brain, since the immortal flatworm planeria (composed of 20% stem cells) demonstrate the ability to retain trained behavior after decapitation and given the time to regrow new heads.
Under general anesthesia, Planaria also temporarily lose the memory of how to regrow their heads, sometimes regrowing the head of other species.
th-cam.com/video/jdtmiz2YG0U/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xtWx9guXM-m5a-TX
@@markb3786 My guess is that the quantum probability wave is consciousness and becomes time constrained within vibrating mesoscopic networks controlling our bodies.
th-cam.com/video/sPGZSC8odIU/w-d-xo.htmlsi=fDsQ9oVMu1DuLTwn
Please, I dare you to have a nonstop walk for 7 hours. After this, please try to dislike anyone as your first test. If you do it successfully, let me keep coming back to this world as the Satan people talk about.